This post was originally shared on Kanzenshuu’s Patreon page in September 2024. I am reposting it here for posterity and larger exposure for the work that we do. If you enjoy this kind of work, be sure to check out the actual website… and after that, you’ll assuredly want to become a Patron!
It’s done! I’m done! We’re all done! (Mostly!)
As Dragon Ball Heroes comes to a close (and Divers looms in the wings, and then of course we also have Daima about a month away!), it’s worth taking a look back at just how important Dragon Ball GT has been to this overall franchise in the post-revival era.
The various Carddass arcade games dabbled in nostalgia and new forms for sure; after all, it was Dragon Battlers that introduced Super Saiyan 3 for Vegeta and Broli (yes, ahead of the Raging Blast games!)… but there is no debating just how much Dragon Ball Heroes went hogwild across the board with, well, everything.
We got old stuff. We got new stuff. We got combinations of things. We got expansions on existing things.
And all the meanwhile, Dragon Ball GT was an absolute pillar of the entire gosh darn thing!
The “Evil Dragons Mission” update series (“Ja’aku Ryū Mission” and thus the “JM” shorthand) hit in late 2013. Along with the “Galaxy Mission” update series, these first big updates to Heroes (coming after the mainline launch), and we were already going hard with GT!
(Even to this very day in the Year of our Dende 2024, the first Dragon Ball-related thing you might see in any given issue of V-Jump has a 50/50 shot of being from GT.)
Along with the “Evil Dragons Mission” update series, Shueisha, Toei, and Bandai Namco got together and decided that an “Anime Comic” (something we might call an “animanga” — screenshots with dialog bubbles) for Dragon Ball GT would be a perfect complement. The show had been off the air for upwards of 15 years, and with nothing other than expensive DVDs on the market, it made sense to have something else to help indoctrinate the kids and let them know how cool all this big red monkey stuff was.
The thing is, the games were currently featuring the Evil Dragons, but the beginning of the series is a slow build-up to Baby. So, in a kind of shocking and eerily familiar twist… they skipped ahead.
The Dragon Ball GT Anime Comic debuted in the January 2014 issue of Saikyō Jump (released in December 2013), and after a single-page recap (“A Grand Problem” anyone?!), we got right into the action with the Evil Dragons!
The series ran for 38 chapters this way up to the the July 2019 issue, and at that point (to only moderate surprise?)… they announced they were looping back around to the proper beginning of the series!
The series went on to run for another 35 chapters, taking us through the so-called “Space Exploration arc” into the formal “Baby arc” to wrap things up there.
During its original serialization, the Dragon Ball GT Anime Comic was printed in a fairly limited color palette, similar in some ways to the original Dragon Ball manga’s limited vs. occasional full color chapters. When Saikyō Jump did its big hiatus and refresh in 2021, the series came back on glossy pages in actual full color.
Upon reaching the end of the Baby arc (almost exactly a year ago right now!), the Dragon Ball GT Anime Comic went poof, seemingly in favor of the colorized version of Akira Toriyama’s Sand Land manga series. As we speak right now, that JUST finished up with chapter 14 in the October 2024 issue, and we have no idea if maybe Dragon Ball GT will return for the Super 17 arc… or if that’s just lost to time!
In the meantime, the Dragon Ball GT Anime Comic did get a collected volume release… though only of the Evil Dragons arc. That spanned three volumes (all of which came out the same day back in December 2019), and that’s been it since then. Zilch! Nada! Nothing!
So where am I going with all of this?
Well, it seems no-one’s actually done the effort of cataloging this manga release. Like, at all. Folks have some entries here and there for those three collected volumes of the Evil Dragons arc, but that’s it.
There’s been an unlinked entry for it in our “Manga Guide” for over 10 years now, so I’m so psyched to say that there is finally a full page detailing the entire (for now?!) 73-chapter run of the Dragon Ball GT Anime Comic. Release dates, prices, chapter titles, the episodes they correspond to, and (in many cases; more on that in a bit) title page thumbnails.
Again, near as I can tell, this is the only page on the entire Internet that has this information (until someone else just copies and pastes it). Seriously, I’m checking right now by looking for these specific chapter titles, and Kanzenshuu is the only search result on both English and Japanese Google.
Here’s a little behind-the-scenes on the process!
It would be a little tedious to constantly grab books of the shelf to flip through, so I made myself a little multi-step process to do things in easy phases.
First off, I already have a giant spreadsheet that I maintain each month listing Saikyō Jump‘s contents, prices, release dates, etc. A good quarter-ish of the hard work was already done!
That said, I still needed to grab each physical issue anyway because I needed the chapter titles. Woof.
I took photos of every chapter’s beginning and ending pages, so I could (1) transcribe and translate the chapter titles, and then (2) quickly scrub through actual episodes to compare these points in time to see which episode(s) each chapter covered.
From there it was a pretty easy process. There were only a couple times I had to go back and pull the actual respective issue of the shelf again to really dig in and compare, and mostly when the comic started skipping major portions of episodes.
And that leads me to some fun anecdotes from this research process!
- There’s a four-way tie for episodes that were covered in the longest stretch of individual chapters: episodes 59, 60, 61, and 62 all in a row each spanned four chapters.
- On the flip side, chapter 50 (chapter 12 of the Space Exploration arc) covers episodes 13-19, the biggest stretch of material. As part of this span of chapters (roughly 11 to 15), we just entirely skip over the space worms, most of the Sigma stuff, etc. It’s actually wild just how much material they skipped over around here!
- There’s only a single chapter of the entire run that is not 16 pages: chapter 49 (chapter 11 of the Space Exploration arc) is 20 pages. This comes from the May 2021 issue of Saikyō Jump, which was the last one before the big hiatus and refresh that summer/fall. Maybe they wanted to cram a little extra content in due to the impending break? I dunno!
- Incidentally, that same chapter says it’s the end of the Space Exploration arc… but the next two chapters just continue the same arc name and chapter numbering. It’s not until the November 2021 issue that the Baby arc is formally given that title and begins with its own unique numbering.
Another really interesting and frustrating thing about the Dragon Ball GT Anime Comic is that they made it wrong.
Something I had to learn intimately well during my AMV heyday was that DVDs were encoded at a resolution of 720×480 with non-square pixels. If you pull an absolutely raw rip of that video content 1:1 with itself, that’s not a proper 4:3 aspect ratio; you’re looking for 640×480 there. Due to the nature of this encoding, DVD playback hardware and software would on the fly correct fullscreen content to 4:3 for TV display (or in the case of anamorphic widescreen content, stretch it out to its proper 16:9 aspect ratio).
The layout artists for the Dragon Ball GT Anime Comic apparently did not know this, so everything is wider than it should be.
In this example that I put together for the guide page, you can see in particular how Goku is much broader in the manga than he is in the (properly-scaled) episode screenshot. Everyone else suffers the same fate.
If you don’t know to look for it, you might not necessarily notice it. No-one at Shueisha has apparently ever noticed this, because I’m pretty sure the entire run of the comic looks this way!
This brings me to something else frustrating about Shueisha and all their partners: this lack of precision and care extends not just to the product itself, but to its history!
See, the old Saikyō Jump website had a nice little page where you could get a preview of what manga series were running in any given issue. Usually you could click and see the first three or four pages. This was fantastic, because it meant I could get a nice digital version of a chapter title page!
Unfortunately, the coding behind the site was set up so that the exact same URL structure was in place for images each respective update. This meant the following URL…
http://www.shonenjump.com/j/saikyo/manga/images/s-ph/09_1.gif
…could one month bring you to a Dragon Ball GT Anime Comic preview page, or depending on the lineup and order of content that issue, maybe something from Naruto or One Piece or something else entirely. They uploaded images on top of each other every time a new issue came out and they updated the website, rather than giving them bespoke URLs each time.
This resulted in the fact that even if archive.org has a record of this web page from multiple dates and times and months that should have their own unique content, since the URL structure for its images didn’t change… they didn’t always update their archive of those images.
I realized this back in the day, and made a somewhat-concerted effort to start saving all the preview images I could. Unfortunately, I fell down on the job pretty often, and once I started losing some, I kinda gave up.
This is why you see a pretty sparse set of nice clean chapter page thumbnails on our guide page. I have everything I saved back in the day, and let me tell you that I spent a good couple days doing some digital archeology on every permutation of every URL structure I could to try and find any other missing images using archive.org… and I think I only came up with one rescue, maybe? I was extremely disappointed!
(Thankfully Saikyō Jump finally got a corresponding digital release starting with that big refresh, so everything from that point onward is super easy.)
Where I’m going with this is: it’s frustrating how little Shueisha cares about their own digital history. On one hand, they probably don’t want me having nice almost-master-quality versions of their chapter title pages. On the other hand, as we’ve seen with the move from db30th to dragonball.news to dragon-ball-official… articles don’t carry over from random site relaunch to random site relaunch, and archive.org doesn’t have everything from these sites in their, well, archive. Stuff — history — is just GONE.
So I’m sitting over here wondering if there are any other psychos who, ten years ago, might have been saving chapter title page previews from these websites. If you know anyone who did this, or especially if this was you, for the love of Dende please let us know! We would love to collaborate and fill in the missing blocks of images here.
As I did with the first chapter title page, I could just scan them all myself… but these books are so thick, and the Dragon Ball GT Anime Comic is often placed in such an awkward position, that it makes it pretty difficult to do without destroying the book itself. I’d rather not do that.
PHEW!
So check out the new guide page, let me know if you have any leads on archived chapter title pages, and I’ll be back at ya’ soon!
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