Shônen manga, aka boys' manga (the #1 category in the unapologetically gender-targeted world of Japanese comics), has always involved action and fighting. But after the success of Dragon Ball (which itself arose in the testosterone-heavy climate of early '80s manga like City Hunter and Fist of the North Star), a new generation of manga started to mix fantasy, comedy and a light attitude with the classic martial arts formula of training and maiming. Forget about the big megahit Dragon Ball-influenced manga like Bleach, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Naruto-those ones are okay, but these are the ones you've got to read.

• One Piece (Eiichiro Oda). Wacky super-powered pirates travel the globe of a fantasy world in search of "One Piece," a legendary lost treasure. The illustration for the article comes from this. Running since 1997 in Japan, this series combines the high spirits and humor of Dragon Ball with its own particular brand of gory (yet usually nonfatal) swordfights and punchups. It's Pirates of the Caribbean meets Dragon Quest meets Yellow Submarine, with blood; plus the world of One Piece is much more fleshed out and internally consistent than Dragon Ball ever was Oda says Toriyama is his favorite artist, and the two of them have even collaborated on a one-shot Dragon Ball/One Piece crossover, Cross Epoch. (It's not officially translated, but unlicensed scanlations can be found online.)

• Jing: King of Bandits (Yuichi Kumakura). The fantastical adventures of a young bandit in a Looney Tunes world of surrealism, wild scenery and strange monsters. This 1995-1998 manga (and its more Gothic sequel, Jing: King of Bandits: Twilight Tales) is episodic, without any real ongoing story, but it's a children's fantasy adventure with style.

• Ranma 1/2 (Rumiko Takahashi). Another must-read kung fu manga, which ran in a competing magazine, Weekly Shônen Sunday, from 1987 to 1996. Ranma 1/2 (from the creator of the rather blah Inuyasha) is very different from Dragon Ball; it's a pure action-comedy, with not much story to speak of, and it's about a group of high school martial artists cursed to transform into various animals and things when they're splashed with cold water. The hero transforms from a guy into a girl, often when naked, leading to much speculative fanfiction. But if you read only two manga about Chinese-style martial arts, let this be number two.

• Eyeshield 21 (Riichiro Inagaki, Yusuke Murata). Action manga. Spiky hair. American football. 'Nuff said. This (intentionally) hilarious, melodramatic sports manga has been running since 2002.

• Shaman King (Hiroyuki Takei). Had enough fighting manga in faraway lands, with silly characters? How about a fighting manga set in the modern world, where the heroes are shamans and wizards fighting a tournament ON THE BEHALF OF VARIOUS THINLY-DISGUISED WORLD MYTHOLOGIES TO DETERMINE WHICH WILL BE THE DOMINANT RELIGION FOR THE NEXT 500 YEARS? This bizarre 1998-2005 manga is full of subversive humor, pot leaves (mostly censored in the English edition), American superhero references and crazy fight scenes. Unfortunately it kind of peters out before the conclusion.

• Knights of the Zodiac: Saint Seiya (Masami Kurumada). Running from 1986 to 1990, this series technically isn't influenced by Dragon Ball; the veteran artist, Kurumada, had been drawing boxing comics and boys' action stories long before Toriyama got started. But the cartoony, nonstop violence and machismo of Saint Seiya is a manga classic, the Green Arrow to Dragon Ball's Green Lantern. The plot theoretically involves martial artists who derive their powers from the Greek gods (they're holy warriors, aka "saints"-an element obscured in the unsuccessful English translation of the anime), but basically it's just one fight scene after another. Its over-the-top insanity and complete lack of logic makes Dragon Ball look like a work of heavy intellectualism.

• Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (Hirohiko Araki). Like Saint Seiya, this one's another parallel evolution of action manga. From 1987 to the present day, with breaks of no more than a few months, this horror-superhero-mystery adventure has delivered its own brand of craziness to readers throughout Japan. It starts out as the story of two feuding brothers in Britain in the 1890s, turns into a story about martial artists versus vampires, then about globetrotting psychic-powered heroes who can materialize spirits outside their bodies. The current storyline, Steel Ball Run, is about a transcontinental horse race in the Wild West. With superpowers. Imagine a glam fusion of Burne Hogarth's Tarzan, Bill Sienkiewicz's run on New Mutants, '80s splatter films, and Knights of the Zodiac, and you have an inkling of the idea.

• Dr. Slump (Akira Toriyama). This one isn't the "spawn" of Dragon Ball, it's the older brother. Toriyama's 1980-1984 Dr. Slump, a slapstick comedy about the adventures of a mad scientist and his android "daughter," is full of sci-fi movie references, robots, aliens and poop jokes. Some Japanese culture commentators consider it the last "grassroots" manga megahit, before later shows (including Dragon Ball) became more commercial and calculated. It's Toriyama's personal favorite of his own manga. And he drew it while living with his parents!

Toriyama used only very few assistants compared to most manga artists, so his work lacks the stiffly drafted backgrounds and obviously traced photos which give so many manga a cookie-cutter look.

Dinosaurs, dragons, monsters, and strange sci-fi vehicles of all kinds float through the strange world of Dragon Ball. If his style looks familiar, he also did the art for the Dragon Quest video game series. We've created a gallery of some images from Dragon Ball and Toriyama's first series, Dr. Slump.

Jason Thompson is the author of "Manga: The Complete Guide" and the forthcoming Del Rey graphic novel "King of RPGs". As a manga editor for Viz and Random House, he has worked on the English editions of Dragon Ball, Yu-Gi-Oh!, YuYu Hakusho, Uzumaki, Fullmetal Alchemist and many other titles.

Dragonball: Evolution is the live action adaptation of Akira Toriyama's manga Dragon Ball. Fans of the original manga and anime series are seething with questions. Does Justin Chatwin look enough like Goku, who's supposed to be 12 years old in the original manga? Is James Marsters, playing Piccolo, green enough? Regardless of these quibbles, the movie's goofy haircuts, landscape-leveling super martial arts, and magic orange balls with little stars in them are all recognizably Dragon Ball.

Like most manga, Dragon Ball is a single story, not part of a universe of characters like DC or Marvel comics. But with over 8,000 pages of comics since 1984, countless anime and video games, and lots of characters with names like "Trunks" and "Vegeta," it's easy for outsiders to get lost. Here, we answer some basic questions about the arguably unfilmable series.

What is Dragon Ball?

What is Dragon Ball Z/Dragon Ball GT/Dragon Ball Kai/etc.?

What exactly are the Dragon Balls? (Spoilers, though not for the movie)

So is it science fiction or fantasy or what?

Bulma, Goku, Piccolo, Chichi-what's up with the names?

Isn't Dragon Ball just a bunch of speedlines and ripped dudes with bad hair screaming "It's over 9,000!"

What do fans think of the live-action version?

Jason Thompson is the author of "Manga: The Complete Guide" and the forthcoming Del Rey graphic novel "King of RPGs". As a manga editor for Viz and Random House, he has worked on the English editions of Dragon Ball, Yu-Gi-Oh!, YuYu Hakusho, Uzumaki, Fullmetal Alchemist and many other titles.

One of the problems with the TV series was that it had to follow the plot of the manga, which was also being produced at a rate of one chapter a week. However, one 14-page chapter, consisting mostly of fighting, does not easily fill up a 20-minute animated TV show. As a result, the originally brisk and action-packed manga became padded out into a bloated mess of a TV show. To kill time (and save animation costs), characters would just talk endlessly about what was happening, rather than doing anything. Sometimes the animators created their own non-canon storylines, "filler arcs," in which characters wandered off and got into little adventures or fought one another in different combinations. However, these side stories were never allowed to alter the main plot. Countless animated movies and TV specials, which regurgitated concepts from the manga (Hey! Freeza's got a brother, and he's a bad guy too!) usually just exacerbated the problem. The animators also do an inconsistent job of adapting Toriyama's cartoony character designs for the screen.

For those who would prefer a tighter Dragon Ball Z anime, there is hope; on April 5, 2009, Toei Animation released the first episode of Dragon Ball Kai ("Dragon Ball altered/modified") a remastered edition of the original Dragon Ball Z created for the show's 20th anniversary. According to Toei and Fuji TV, in addition to audio and video remastering, Dragon Ball Kai will eliminate the many "filler arcs" and redundant scenes created for the original Dragon Ball Z anime and make the story stick more closely to Akira Toriyama's original manga.

As for the speedlines and crazy hair and the guys shooting energy out of their hands due to their mastery of martial arts, that's all there in the original. (The yellow hair is the outward sign of a power-up, "Super Saiyan," which doesn't show up until the second half of the original manga.) And for those who embrace the absurdity, there are many fan-made live-action Dragon Ball movies.

The original Japanese anime series, based on the manga, was also called Dragon Ball. It ran from 1986 to 1989, and covered a little past the ending of manga volume 16, up to the end of Goku's final battle with his first archenemy, Piccolo. At this point, Toriyama was gearing up for a major new story arc, and Toei Animation decided to relaunch the anime under a new name. They chose the name Dragon Ball Z (pronounced "Zet" in Japanese). The reasons for the name change are obscure, but Toriyama joked in an interview with Banzai!, a now-discontinued German manga magazine, that he chose the subtitle "Z" because he was getting tired of drawing Dragon Ball and the last letter of the alphabet would make readers think the end of the series was approaching. (It's an open secret that Toriyama intended to end the Dragon Ball manga years before the actual ending, but was pressured into continuing it since it was such a moneymaker.)

No such luck; the Dragon Ball Z TV series ran from 1989 to 1996. At this point the manga series had already ended, but the licensors decided to continue the series in an anime-only form based on some of Toriyama's ideas and character designs. The resulting new series, in which Goku travels through outer space and meets a lot of aliens, was titled Dragon Ball GT ("Grand Tour"). Dragon Ball GT ran from 1996 to 1997 and is not considered canon by many fans of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z.

Imagination-rich and information-poor fans spread rumors of other spin-offs with names like Dragon Ball AF. None of these are real, except for the 2009 Dragon Ball Kai, which is not a new series but a remastered version of Dragon Ball Z. (See "Isn't Dragon Ball just a bunch of speedlines and ripped dudes with bad hair screaming "It's over 9,000!"".)

None of these anime adaptations and spin-offs have any direct relation to Dragonball: Evolution, and the subtitle "Evolution" is purely an invention of the American filmmakers.

* In the film, Goku is a semi-normal high school student, rather than a childish monkey-boy with a tail who lives in the woods. However, even in the anime and manga, Goku does eventually grow up from a three-foot-tall Peanuts character into a normal-sized, perhaps Chatwin-sized adult.
* Piccolo's skin isn't a very bright green, and he doesn't seem to have antennae
* Master Roshi, who in the manga is a dirty old man who asks to look at Bulma's panties in return for a Dragon Ball, doesn't commit any acts of sexual harassment
* a bunch of characters have been removed, including Kuririn (Goku's fellow student under Master Roshi), the talking animals Pu'ar and Oolong, and Master Roshi's pet turtle
* plenty of plots and subplots have been removed, leaving the movie as kind of a mixture of Dragon Ball volumes 1-2 (the introduction of Goku and Bulma) and 13-16 (the introduction of Piccolo, and the big fight).

There's plenty more. A more serious complaint, however, is that "the script is an absolute, unmitigated disaster," to quote Zach Berlatsky of anime news network. What does the creator, Akira Toriyama himself, think about the Dragonball adaptation? Here's a translation of his words in a text announcement preceding a February 2009 promotional video:

"As the original creator, I had a feeling of "Huh?" upon seeing the screenplay and the character designs, but the director, all the actors, the staff, and the rest are nothing but "ultra" high-caliber people. Maybe the right way for me and all the fans to appreciate it is as a New Dragonball of a different dimension. Perhaps, this might become a great masterpiece of power! Hey, I look forward to it!!"

Toriyama is more charitable to Hollywood than Alan Moore-but then again, Toriyama, like most manga artists, has always had no illusions about producing mass entertainment. (Incidentally, it's worth mentioning that Dragonball: Evolution is not the first Dragon Ball film; that honor goes to 1989's Dragon Ball: The Magic Begins, an unlicensed Chinese live-action adaptation.)

The best thing going for Dragonball: Evolution is that, beneath all the spiky hair and shouting, Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball is a good story. (Particularly if you're a 14-year-old boy.) The fights and cliffhangers are exciting, the villains are reprehensible and the heroes are noble (and sometimes the villains are noble too, deep down), and the mixture of sci-fi, fantasy and comedy is entertaining and imaginative.

But there are other elements of Dragon Ball which may be difficult to make the transition to live action. One of these is the quirky, simple art style which gives Toriyama's work so much of its appeal. Toriyama's stories may be intense by the standards of American children's animation, but the appeal of his art is the cartooniness, which, when Dragon Ball started in the '80s, stood out among more square-jawed macho manga like City Hunter and Fist of the North Star. (Today, on the other hand, the influence of Dragon Ball has made the big-eyed, spiky-haired angular look the default manga style.) Putting simple, cartoony characters in dramatic situations is one of the trademark elements of manga and anime, and a more interesting way to adapt Dragon Ball might have been with film-quality animation or CGI, like the upcoming Astro Boy live-action movie. Although Keanu Reeves may not look entirely like Spike Spiegel in Cowboy Bebop, no real human being can look quite like a Toriyama character.

To use another example, Akira is set in a recognizably real urban sci-fi environment, but Dragon Ball is set in a primary-colored, fairytale world. The Wachowski Bros.' Speed Racer tried the "live-action cartoon" approach, with mixed success, but will Dragonball: Evolution go the grim-and-gritty route and turn out like the live-action Super Mario Bros.? Manga and anime fans cringe at the word "cartoon," but it's a good word to describe Toriyama's creations: a world which combines aliens and magic dragons, comedy and drama, absurdity and sincerity, a world of sweat and blood and winking unrealism.

Dragon Ball is, basically, a martial arts story with elements of fantasy, science fiction and comedy. The hero, Goku, is a boy with a monkey's tail (or not, in the live-action version) who is raised in the woods by a martial artist. Bulma, a girl on a quest for the seven magic Dragon Balls (a treasure which can grant any wish), accidentally discovers the guileless Goku and introduces him to civilization. Over many adventures, Goku travels around the world, develops his already prodigious fighting skills, and saves the world from evil martial artists many times over.

This is the basic formula: lots of martial arts, lots of training sequences, a few jokes. (Sometimes dirty jokes.) Whether Goku's opponent is the green-skinned Great Demon King Piccolo (his first major opponent, played by James Marsters in Dragonball: Evolution), or the alien mercenary Vegeta (presumably next in line for the sequel), or the artificial life form Cell, or the genie-like magical pink blob of doom Boo, the structure is the same. New bad guys show up, and Goku must defeat them (as much out of a love of a good fight as a desire to save the planet); if he's not strong enough, or he loses the first round, he hits the gym and soon he's buff enough to have a fighting chance. Rinse and repeat for 14 pages a week, once a week for ten years, and you have a 42-volume, 8,000-page graphic novel series.

This Dragon Ball formula became the model for a successful shonen (boys') manga, inspiring such little-known works as Yu-Gi-Oh! and Naruto. But it wasn't always intended as an epic, and if it seems to have lots of quirky elements (such as Bulma's blue hair, or the magic nyoi-bo staff which Goku sometimes fights with, or the titular Dragon Balls themselves, which really aren't even that important in the manga), it's because the series changed a lot over its 10-year run. When he started Dragon Ball, Akira Toriyama was best known for his previous hit, the 1980-1984 mad scientist comedy manga Dr. Slump. Dragon Ball was also conceived as a comedy, or comedy-adventure, albeit based on Hong Kong martial arts movies rather than the science fiction genre. But readers reacted more to the action elements than the comedy, and so, with the guidance (or pressure) of his editors, Toriyama gradually de-emphasized the humor elements (such as the talking animals, which aren't in the movie) and emphasized the fighting and melodrama. The resulting hit combo was spun off into anime, video games, and merchandise, and made Shônen Jump magazine the manga equivalent of DC and Marvel put together; at its peak in the early '90s, before the magazine market started its slow worldwide decline, it sold 6.53 million copies per week. As for Dragon Ball, it was rated the #3 manga series of all time by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs .

The anime was first translated for English syndication in 1995, although it didn't become a hit until it started appearing on Cartoon Network's Toonami programming block in 1998, where less intense censorship allowed the characters to really beat each other up like in the original Japanese version. The manga was translated by VIZ and printed as two separate series, Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z... which leads into the next question.

He speaks - and holy hell does he sound like one of those movie announcer fellas. I wish they would tone down the bass a little and tone up the Marsters for this version of Piccolo. But I do like the whole hand-squishing-the-house move.

More Dragonball Evolution fighting scenes, including one showing how you can flick a fly in mid air into your opponent's throat, and it still doesn't stop them:

This last clip is actually the first trailer that has perked my interest, mainly because it's all live action Anime gags and eye-bulges. That Justin Chatwin, he's kind of growing on me. Dragonball Evolution will be in theaters on April 8th.

Does it not look like the two enemies are skating a top a large mountain, hand in hand? Especially when the finishing moves for each Kamehameha end in a dance-like "You've been served" kind of pose. Dragonball Evolution, starring Justin Chatwin as Goku and James Marsters as Lord Piccolo, will be out April 9th. [DB The Movie]

Greetings Shenron — or at least the giant dragon that I assume is Shenron, who comes out to play when the seven dragonballs are collected on Earth. I believe the legend goes that when Shenron is summoned, the summoner gets one wish. On the plus side, this footage looks about a thousand times better than all the previous clips we've seen. Which puts it at about Scooby-Doo live action remake territory.

And here's the new French trailer for the film, which makes it sound smoky and sophisticated:

In addition to the footage we've got details from the set from Dragonball, straight out of the film's press book.

First off, Director of Photography Robert McLachlan explains how he created a special type of film for this movie,

which helped provide the heavily color-saturated look he was after. The color saturation adds to the intensity of the film’s solar eclipse, which in the story signals a potentially cataclysmic event. “We wanted our eclipse to be much more surreal [than a typical solar eclipse], with weird, intense, reddish colors,” says McLachlan.

But that's not all. The mystical dragon balls weren't really "real" after all, in fact Velasco Shaw, one of the top FX staff on crew explained that just about all of these balls were, for the most part, fake.

Also inside the press book as quite an interesting scoop on things actor Chow Yun-Fat wanted to do to change make his character more like Roshi, since he couldn't look like him 100%:

One of the many ideas the actor proposed for the character was donning gray-tinted contact lenses, hinting at the onset of cataracts. “I thought the lenses would add to the realism and relatability of Roshi,” says Chow, who also regularly practiced Tai Chi and mediation before and during the shoot.

The press book also includes a much more detailed plot summary:

Goku’s quest – with nothing less than the fate of our world at stake – begins innocently enough in the backyard of his grandfather’s home, where Gohan is training the young man in some exotic martial arts moves. It is Goku’s 18th birthday, and Gohan’s gift to his grandson is a Dragonball, a small, round ball whose surface is smooth and pearl-like, but with a milky translucence that gives it depth. Four stars float inside the ball. There are only six others like it in the world, and it is said the seven Dragonballs together will grant the holder one perfect wish.

Connected to the legend of the Dragonballs is Goku’s own mysterious past – he never knew his parents – as well as the coming solar eclipse, which superstitions mark as a sign of a coming apocalypse. Gohan promises to reveal all to Goku at the special birthday dinner Gohan is preparing for his grandson.

But Goku skips out on Gohan’s feast, to attend a party hosted by Chi Chi, a fellow student to whom Goku is drawn. As the two teens get to know one another, a tragedy at home is triggered by the arrival of a dark force – propelling Goku, Roshi, Bulma, Yamcha and Chi Chi into a race to collect all seven Dragonballs. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Goku will face the deadliest enemies on Earth, master a powerful force called Ki, which marshals the energy of the universe – and learn the truth of his incredible past…and of a potentially unthinkable future....

One of the first steps in Goku’s journey is to seek out Roshi, an elderly Master who completes Goku’s training, helps him unlock the secret of his past – and joins him in a quest to save the world. Roshi is unlike any Eastern Master you’ve seen before; he has an eye for the ladies and favors Hawaiian shirts....

The burgeoning relationship between Chi Chi and Goku comes from, in part, them being kindred spirits. “Chi Chi is drawn to Goku’s secret ability to fight,” says Chung. “She feels there’s something really special about Goku, and she’s able to bring that out in him.”

Another beautiful young woman joining Goku in his quest is Bulma, a scientist described in the manga as the “smartest girl in the world.” The film retains the manga character’s confidence, intensity and intelligence – and the fact that she knows exactly what she wants. And what Bulma wants is the Dragonball stolen from her father’s company. Wielding a laser-guided, high-tech magnum pistol and a Dragonball-tracker, Bulma will do anything to retrieve the five-starred Dragonball, which she thinks will supply an unlimited source of energy – and immense financial rewards.

In their search for the Dragonballs, Goku, Roshi and Bulma face their adversary, Lord Piccolo... Working with Piccolo is Mai, an exotic beauty tainted by malevolence. Her weapons of choice are throwing knives known as shiruken.

[DB The Movie]

Director James Wong spoke with Italian site Badtaste.it, all about his magical fist cams, and the interview was kindly translated by fansite DB The Movie:

The visual effects supervisor (Ariel Shaw) took what Wong defines as “fist-cams” using the renowned company Iconix, cameras so small that they can be linked to the hand of an actor and that allows the stroke of a character’s [fist] to go directly to the [audience].

“It’s kind of a point of view of the fist,” says Wong. McLachlan [the director of photography] suggested that the use of new digital cameras (the high-speed Phantoms) to create super-speed in major action sequences. “We have done a lot of research and development tests with chambers Phantom,” says McLachlan, who discovered this system of photography, then experimental, on YouTube.

"The point of view of the fist." Of course, why don't we do that more often? Because it's terrible. What a ridiculous idea. Hopefully, they'll make the camera shots super slo-mo so we can see it hit the face of Lord Piccolo, and then the slo-mo wincing will commence.

[Badtaste.it via DB The Movie]