Roughly every month, Toyotarō provides a drawing of a Dragon Ball (or related…!) character — as well as an accompanying comment — on the official Japanese Dragon Ball website. Following up on the wealth of characters already drawn, for his November 2024 entry (posted in early December), Toyotarō has drawn three of the Neko Majin from the Akira Toriyama manga series of the same name.

Neko Majin
A series I really like with a lot of connections to Dragon Ball

A few years after completing Dragon Ball, and sporadically over the next few years in between his other projects, Akira Toriyama released chapters of Neko Majin, a series that increasingly became a Dragon Ball parody and spin-off as it went on. Chapters were published between Weekly Shōnen Jump and (the now-defunct) Monthly Shōnen Jump, sometimes entire years apart from each other. The series consists of two chapters of Neko Majin ga Iru (“Neko Majin is Here”), one chapter of Neko Majin Mike, and five chapters of Neko Majin Z. The final two chapters of Neko Majin Z bucked the trend and were published back-to-back in consecutive issues of Monthly Shōnen Jump. All eight chapters were collected into a single kanzenban-sized volume in April 2005; they were later released in a new digitally-colorized version in April 2013.

The only chapter ever to be officially published and released in English has been Neko Majin Z 5, which was printed (without a chapter number) in the October 2007 issue of Viz’s (now-defunct) print version of Shonen Jump.

This drawing and comment set has been added to the respective page in our “Translations” archive.