Dragon Boy

Synopsis

Dragon Boy is a manga by Akira Toriyama that ran originally in the Fresh Jump. It was later released in Akira Toriyama's Manga Theater Vol. 2. Dragon Boy is best known for being a prototype for the much more popular Dragon Ball manga, which began the following year.

Dragon Boy features the adventures of a boy named Tangtong and an unlikely ragtag group who go on a journey to the Flower Country. This short work is 45-page long (15 for the first chapter and 21 for the second), and it combines the comedic style of Toriyama's successful Dr. Slump series with a more action-oriented plot and pays homage to famous martial art actor Jackie Chan. Toriyama noted that his goal for the series was to tell an "unconventional and contradictory" story. Like Dragon Ball, this manga is mainly based on the Chinese story Journey to the West. Several elements from the story were later reused in Dragon Ball, largely in the first 13 chapters, notably the martial arts theme and the general atmosphere. Dragon Boy even has its own version of the Dragon Ball artifacts. However, in this incarnation, the Dragon Balls produce small dragons when hit with an energy blast, which actually was quite useless when Tangtong summoned it in the story.