DRAGON BALL SUPER VOLUME 5

Story by: Akira Toriyama | Art by: Toyotarou

Continuing the precedent set in the previous volume, DRAGON BALL SUPER book 5 wraps up the Future Trunks/Goku Black storyline, but does so in a vastly different fashion that the TV show. In the anime, after Goku and Vegeta have both battled the merged Zamas, Trunks steps in to deal a crippling blow, slicing Zamas in half. The villain then begins to merge with the entire universe, and Goku summons the Lord of Everything, Zeno (more on that below), to finally wipe out Zamas. Zeno does so, destroying the entire universe in the process.

The manga follows the same basic outline, but instead of the halved Zamas somehow merging with the universe, he is reborn as two full version of himself. From that point forward, any time he's injured, the pieces re-spawn into a full-fledged Zamas. It's really creepy and, for me at least, sells the hopelessness of the situation better than the anime setup.

The manga and anime re-unify after Zamas is beaten -- Goku and Trunks bring Zeno home with them, then Whis suggests that Trunks and Mai use the time machine to return to the future to a point before Zamas attacked, where they enlist the aid of Beerus to kill him. The couple agrees, even though it means they will now co-exist alongside other version of themselves in the revised timeline. With that, Trunks and Mai depart and the saga ends.

Oh, and there's a nice scene that wasn't in the TV version where Pilaf tries to ask future Mai what became of him and Shuu, and she avoids the question. I still have no idea why Pilaf, Mai, and Shuu are children in our timeline (the anime never explained this either), but it's nice to see them get a little page-time, at least.

Now -- what about Zeno? Let's back up a little bit and quickly cover something I didn't mention when it happened (intentionally, because I knew it would fit better here). In the early part of the Goku Black saga, there was a little sidebar where Goku was summoned to appear before Zeno, the Lord of Everything. He had seen the tournament between Universes 6 and 7 and decided Goku looked like a fun guy to hang out with. But Goku, bluffing, promised to bring Zeno someone even better. In the meantime, Zeno gave Goku a special button he could use to either travel to Zeno's world or summon Zeno to him. In the parallel future, Goku uses that button to summon the parallel Zeno to Earth for help against Zamas. Subsequently, since parallel Zeno has nowhere to go with his entire multiverse wiped out, Goku brings him to live with the main Zeno, fulfilling his promise.

And during that scene, Goku reminds Zeno of something he had mentioned the last time they were together: Zeno wants to hold a tournament for all twelve universes. The Zenos agree that's a great idea, and summon the dieties of every universe to inform them. But parallel Zeno is unfamiliar with the concept, so Zeno orders the twelve destroyer gods to have a battle royale right then and there (a departure from the anime, where instead Goku and some of his friends from Universe 7 sparred with fighters from Universe 9). The volume ends with the battle in full swing, as Beerus's fellow destroyers gang up on him after learning that his universe is the cause of the summons and upcoming tournament.

Reading the Goku Black saga was a weird experience. It's the first part of the manga the diverges significantly from the plot of the TV show. The main beats are the same between both, of course, due to Akira Toriyama providing an overall outline to both Toei Animation and Toyotarou. But there's a one-on-one chat between Toriyama and Toyotarou in the back of the previous volume in which Toyotarou expresses (not in so many words, but the implication is there) that he's become more comfortable at this point with putting his own spin on the story -- so I suspect that going forward, the manga will continue to differ from the anime in interesting ways.

(Specifically, Toyotarou states that Trunks having healing powers since he was apprenticed to Kaioshin was his idea. I'm sure most of the other larger divergences must be as well, based on this.)

And while I liked the manga's conclusion to the saga better than the anime version, I felt the anime handled the beginning better, as I mentioned a couple weeks ago. But while I may like some of Toyotarou's contributions, there's one area where I'm not a huge fan: his characterization of Goku. Now -- I'll start by noting that the SUPER anime doesn't give us the greatest representation of Goku, either. The character had always been presented as naive, from the earliest part of DRAGON BALL. But as he grew up, the naivete was dialed back significantly. He was a bit of a bumpkin, but he (mostly) understood how the world worked.

SUPER, however, decided that "naive" and "bumpkin" mean the same thing as "bread-dead idiot". SUPER's Goku is just dumb. He says stupid things that DBZ Goku never would've said. He no longer understands the simplest things about society. It's like he was reverted to his childhood personality, but with an added layer of idiocy attached to the naivete. Look -- there's a scene in both the anime and the manga where Goku sees Trunks and Mai kiss, and expresses confusion about what they're doing. Vegeta says something like, "What, you've never kissed your wife?" and Goku reacts with horror at the thought. It's absurd. Goku conceived two children with Chi Chi. Even if he didn't know what a kiss was when they first met, she would've explained it.

There's also a bit that appears in both versions of the story, before the Universe 6/7 tournament, where the entrants all take a written test and Majin Boo fails. But Goku also nearly fails. My recollection is that it's played relatively innocuously on the show, but in the manga, Goku comes across as an illiterate simpleton. And then there's this: the bit that got me to write these paragraphs in the first place: during this volume, between the end of the Goku Black saga and the summons from Zeno, there's a scene where Vegeta is training with Whis on Beerus's planet and Goku comes to join him. But Vegeta -- Vegeta -- declare that he needs to return to Earth to be with Bulma, who is on the verge of giving birth to their second child. This leads to the following exchange (remember, it's manga -- read right to left):

Seriously? I would argue that with this exchange, Toyotarou's character assassination of Goku is complete. He's gone from a well-meaning, heroic bumpkin as of the end of the DBZ era to an insensitive, callous idiot by this point in SUPER. It's honestly kind of sickening!

But, moving along -- with that out of my system, next week we'll conclude our look at DRAGON BALL SUPER (for now) with volume 6.