Naho Ohishi, Akira Toriyama’s first apprentice, redrew a classic Dragon Ball cover art

The Super Dragon Ball Gallery project continues to deliver amazing art, and fans of ‘Dragon Ball’ couldn’t be happier with the lavish reinterpretations of the series’ legendary covers through a wide variety of styles. And while we have previously enjoyed the vision of mangakas as celebrated as the authors of ‘Death Note’, ‘Chainsaw Man’, ‘One-Punch Man’, and ‘Jujutsu Kaisen’, now comes the vision of Naho Ohishi, the first disciple of Akira Toriyama and mangaka behind the “superdeformed” ‘Dragon Ball SD’, which reinterprets the original saga in a decidedly humorous way, both in the plot and in the character design.

Volume 18 of ‘Dragon Ball’ with a chibi style

Naho Ohishi wanted to pay tribute both to ‘Dragon Ball’ and his teacher Toriyama by reinterpreting the iconic cover of volume 18 from the original manga, in which Gohan appears driving a tiny Formula 1 car, with Goku advising his son and good old Master Roshi sticking his head out in the scene. To do this, Ohishi has modified both the perspective and the composition, even adding two characters that do not appear in the original art: Krillin and Bulma.

Full screen

In this way, the mangaka maintains the style of the car, with the same color and stickers, although transforming it to her signature chibi-tan style. The same goes for the characters, who adopt an appearance that seems straight out of her own manga, ‘Dragon Ball SD’.

There is less and less left to complete the interpretations of the 42 original covers from the ‘Dragon Ball’ manga by Akira Toriyama, a moment that should coincide with the 40th birthday of the franchise on November 2024. Will we be enjoying the new ‘Dragon Ball Daima’ anime by then? A possible delay to 2025 was recently hinted at instead of its planned release this fall...