The recent April 2003 issue of Viz’s Shonen Jump magazine featured an advertisement for the upcoming “Graphic Novel”-sized release of the company’s Dragon Ball manga translation. The advertisement’s artwork features generic illustrations on the spines instead of the running images that span the entire 42-volume length of the series, which caused concern among some people.

We reached out to Shonen Jump editor Jason Thompson about these concerns and received the following statement:

Thanks for asking, I knew some people were getting anxious about this. Don’t worry, they WILL have running spine-images. The promotional artwork in the ads was made up by some freelancer who didn’t know what he was doing.

Based on this response, fans should expect the proper spine art in the upcoming releases, which hit store shelves 16 April 2003.