Polling Interest - Dragon Ball Super Book Club (Intermediate)

Dusting off the old account to see if there are any takers for a first-time visit or revisit through Dragon Ball’s official sequel manga, Dragon Ball Super.

Where can I get it?
Dragon Ball Super is available in Japanese both original black-and-white format and, like many of Shueisha’s more popular series, in a digital-only colorized edition. There are currently 18 volumes. It’s available through all major Japanese eBook retailers, as well as in print. Volumes run 400-500 yen in black and white, and a little over 500 yen for color.

What is Dragon Ball Super?
The sequel to the original, 42-volume Dragon Ball, running 2015 through current. Story outlines (with one exception) and corrections are provided by original Dragon Ball author Akira Toriyama, with dialogue and art by former fan-artist turned professional Toyotaro. It originally began alongside the Dragon Ball Super TV series as part of a multimedia initiative, but quickly cemented itself as a distinct, stand-alone version of the TV series’ take on Toriyama’s outlines, before continuing on beyond where the TV series leaves off.

It takes place after two Dragon Ball movies penned by Toriyama, Battle of Gods and Resurrection “F”, which could be considered required viewing (or reading if you’re interested in the anime comics instead) providing a lightly altered, brief summary of the first before moving onto original storylines.

It runs once a month with 40±page chapters in Shueisha Jump spin-off magazine V-Jump, alongside series like Boruto, the Dragon Quest Dai prequel, and various Yu-Gi-Oh! sequels.

Why Dragon Ball Super and not Dragon Ball?
For one, 18 volumes is just a lot more manageable for a book-club project than 42. For another, the manga taking a different approach from the anime for Super means there are potentially more people unfamiliar with its version of events, which could make for fun first reads. I also happen to just really like it, as a fan of the original manga, which I think it falls fairly well in line with tonally and pacing-wise, and would love to see more people give it a shot and encounter some blind-readthrough takes from people who are maybe only familiar with the original run.

I also confess that it’s a matter of convenience. I’m translation staff and doing a bit of forum cataloguing for the series on DB fansite Kanzenshuu, so I have plenty of reason to be revisiting the series anyway and thought it could be fun to do so with a bookclub in tow. I’m intensely familiar with both Super and the original series, and more than happy to answer both language-related questions and provide context and trivia along the way!

Pacing/Difficulty
The series is a light read, and I’d like to move through it fairly quickly, so I was thinking one volume a week, with rolling discussion on the next batch of chapters each week. Although the series isn’t intensely difficult, and features even less dialectal writing than the original, that pace and fairly dense pages in some spots still probably means this would be an intermediate book club. I think being or aspiring toward N3 level would be helpful for having fun and keeping pace.

That’s it! If anyone is interested, let me know here! If it looks like there are enough takers, I’ll go ahead and get the thread running with the timeline for the first volume by Friday, May 20!

ぜってぇ読んでくれよな!

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It would be more productive to post in Intermediate Japanese Book Club // Now Reading: TUGUMI・Next: おばちゃんたちのいるところ, though I saw Dragonball (but not Super) mentioned here - Beginner Japanese Book Club // Now Reading: 耳をすませば. Otherwise, Master List of Book Clubs.

Otherwise, a review might be put here - [2022] 多読/extensive reading challenge.

Bookwalker links are here - [Monochrome] [Colored]. (So far, I still can’t pay for Kindle.)

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Thanks! Been a while since I logged in and wasn’t sure how the book club structure worked at this point! Apologies! I remembered a lot of disparate ones running around two or so years back.

I don’t seem to be able to delete the thread, but I suppose I can just let it die off.