‘Dragon Ball’: this was the original design of Goku and Bulma by Akira Toriyama

‘Dragon Ball ' has been celebrating its 40th anniversary throughout the year, as its manga started being published as part of the V-Jump magazine. Despite its discreet start, the adventures of Goku and company quickly became a phenomenon in Japan, prompting an anime series that would sweep the world since the early 90s; and the rest is history. However, the designs that we all know of Goku and Bulma could have been very different; as much as those that we can observe in this preliminary illustration by its author, in which we see its two main protagonists with appearances that, although familiar, showcase quite different personalities.

This was the original versions of Goku and Bulma

For the first chapter of the manga -titled ‘Bulma and Son Goku’-, author Akira Toriyama first went through a long creative process through which to establish the designs and personalities of its main protagonists. Among the discarded ideas we find this vision of both characters sufficiently different from the one that was finally established, with a less ‘technological’ and more ‘country’ Bulma and a Goku, on the contrary, more ‘urbanite’, including clothing and a small ship instead of its famous flying cloud.

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He even went so far as to propose Goku looking decidedly simian -although much more childish and cheerful- based on the Monkey King, the protagonist of the classic novel ‘Journey to the West’. Finally, Akira Toriyama and his editor Kazuhiko Torishima were left with the versions of the heroes that we now know.

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