Dragon Ball was one of the first shows I obsessed over as a kid, and if you grew up in New Zealand around the same time, there's a good chance it was one of yours too.
It landed here properly around 2000, screening on TV3's afternoon block, and it took over school conversation (plus Pokemon, but that's for another blog). My friends and I raced home from school to catch it, we argued on the field at lunchtime about who would win in a fight, and "Kamehameha" became a move we all knew how do..
One of first box sets we had to stock were the Dragon Ball Complete Box Set and the Dragon Ball Z Complete Box Set, I've read them both through and I genuinely think people need to go back and read the manga, not just remember the show. Here's my case for it!
It's a better story than the version you remember
The anime is what most of us watched, but it was famously padded out with filler to stretch episodes, especially in the original Dragon Ball Z run. Whole episodes where nothing happens except someone powering up while the camera cuts to their friends looking worried. The manga doesn't have that problem. Toriyama's pacing is tighter, the jokes land better, and fights that dragged on for three episodes on screen play out in a handful of punchy pages on the page. Reading it as an adult, you notice just how much craft actually went into the storytelling, the stuff you were probably too busy yelling Kamehameha to appreciate the first time around.
It's the reason half of modern manga exists
Dragon Ball was created by Akira Toriyama and ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1984 to 1995. It's since sold over 260 million copies worldwide and is regularly named one of the best-selling manga series ever published. More importantly, it's really the blueprint for the entire modern shonen genre (genre for young boys). There's a strong case that we don't get One Piece, Naruto or Bleach in the form we know them without it, Goku basically became the template for the shonen hero. If you've ever enjoyed any of those series and never actually gone back to where it all started, this is the gap in your reading worth filling!
Toriyama passed away in 2024, and there was a genuine outpouring of tributes from creators across the industry, all pointing back to how much his work shaped theirs. It's a good reminder of just how far-reaching this story has been, from a weekly manga chapter in Japan in the 80s to something that ended up shaping Saturday afternoons for kids all over the world decades later.
The artwork rewards actually slowing down
Toriyama's linework and comic timing get lost a bit when you're watching an adaptation fly past at anime speed. On the page, you get to sit with it properly, panel by panel, and it's a genuinely different (and better) way to experience some of these fights and gags than the show ever gave you.
It's still a great entry point if you've never read it at all
For anyone who's never read it, Dragon Ball follows Son Goku, who starts out as a kid with a monkey tail, searching for seven mystical Dragon Balls that summon a wish-granting dragon when gathered together. It's adventure, martial arts tournaments, and very funny.
Dragon Ball Z then picks up years later, when Goku discovers he's actually a Saiyan, a member of a nearly extinct warrior race, and the story shifts into the escalating, world-ending stakes most people picture when they think of the franchise: Vegeta, Frieza, Cell, Buu, and training arcs so extreme they became internet legend in their own right (anyone online in the 2010s will remember "it's over 9000!" after the show itself had finished). It's still inspiring in a way, and I'm sure has added to the number of guys my age going to the gym and training hard.
These box sets are a great way to do it properly
The Dragon Ball Complete Box Set has all 16 volumes of the original series, and the Dragon Ball Z Complete Box Set has all 26 volumes of the saga most of us actually grew up on.
If you grew up with this, reading the manga is a bit like rediscovering an old friend, except this time you get the whole story the way Toriyama actually intended it, without three episodes of someone slowly powering up... And if you've never read it at all, this really is one of those series worth reading properly at least once.