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Reviewed by Park Cooper To be clear: It’s the first three normal volumes of Viz’s Dragon Ball Z, all in one volume. I’ve talked a lot, relatively lately, about Dragon Ball Z, and the reason for that is that I read it all... but the reason for that is that Viz sent me this thing. So it’s high time I reviewed it. It’s good. I give it an A. As for WHAT Dragon Ball Z is... okay. There was a series called Dragon Ball. Basically, Son Goku was a top-notch powerful martial artist who went around doing good, and mostly tried getting ahold of the 7 powerful Dragon Balls. You get ‘em all in one place, a dragon appears, it grants you a wish. Wow! Of course, since there was also a few bad guys, and one particularly powerful bad guy, the demon king Piccolo (don’t look at me that way, I didn’t name ‘im), we spent most of our time not so much rolling in money like Uncle Scrooge as trying to keep the Dragon Balls out of everyone ELSE’s hands. Well, that was fun while it lasted, but finally Son Goku defeated those what needed defeatin’, I gather, settled down, married his girlfriend, had a kid, etc. WELL! One day, your favorite origin happened—it turns out that Goku was sent to us by another planet! Yeah, he was supposed to take over, but he hit his head real hard when he was tiny, and so grew up Not Evil. Lucky us! Yes, you’ve seen it in Superman Elseworlds, you’ve seen it in Image Comics’ title Invincible, but here’s where it was ripped off from—Dragon Ball Z. Well sure enough, the planet of origin finally gets around to checking on Earth, and it’s up to Son Goku... and Piccolo, because no one pushes around the planet Piccolo’s got dibs on except Piccolo... to defend it! Because these invaders, one in particular, are way better than us... at the start, anyway. And then after THAT beginning, A MILLION AWESOME THINGS HAPPEN. It is not an accident that I, over there on the right, have classified this story as being in the categories of ACTION, SCI-FI, and ACTION-- I did that on purpose. ACTION needed to be in there (at least) twice. Gerard Jones, as I’ve mentioned before, does a good job adapting all this, as he has in fact done for America with the work of Rumiko Takahashi (and much more—see my recent interview of him) for years... the art is nice and clean and a few pages are even in color (like about 24). So anyway, in this giant volume, the bad guys show up... and we drive them away temporarily... but they do manage to KILL SON GOKU! Piccolo decides that when round two gets here, Son Goku’s kid needs to be ready to fight, and therefore Piccolo had better start training the son of his old enemy right away! But it’s hard to die forever in a world where seven balls with stars on ‘em means you can get a wish... so the action’s just getting warmed up! Seriously, there’s lots of details I’m not spoilin’, here. So, it’s exciting, it’s big, it’s classic, if you’re a guy born after 1987 or so it’s probably something you grew up on... “Or a gal, maybe, in some cases,” says Barbara. “We can like battle manga too.” It’s Dragon Ball Z, it’s 17.99 for 3 volumes’ worth, so that’s like almost 500 pages, woo hoo. And it all moves VERY fast, particularly in this VizBig edition. Barb says to mention again, one more time... I went to the library and got ALL the other volumes after reading this, and that I ate ‘em up like candy, and that that doesn’t happen with every manga that comes along. Interested in writing for MangaLife? We're always looking for talented reviewers and columnists, so drop us a line! Charles Webb Editor-in-Chief, MangaLife.com |
1 September 2010
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