The September 2021 issue of Shueisha’s Saikyō Jump magazine kicked off a “Dragon Ball Super Gallery” series in commemoration of the Dragon Ball franchise’s upcoming 40th anniversary. The celebration aims to have different artists all contribute their own spin on the original 42 tankōbon covers, with the images and an accompanying comment published as the magazine’s back cover.
Following the previous forty-one entries, this month’s February 2025 issue brings us the final drawing and comment combo with Eiichiro Oda (One Piece) and their take on the series’ 42nd collected volume cover.
Oda commented:
Back when I was in elementary school, I kept on buying the collected volumes of Dragon Ball right when they first released, starting all the way back in Volume 1, but the truth is, I actually don’t have Volume 42. I had read all of its contents in Jump. I knew when it came out, I went to my bookstore, saw the cover, but then didn’t buy it. I’m really thankful for having been given this opportunity. I just wish I’d gotten the chance to show this to Toriyama-sensei back when he was alive!!
Though Dragon Ball and One Piece have been thrown together in countless video games and even special animation projects, Toriyama and Oda directly collaborated with each other back in 2006 for the special manga chapter Cross Epoch.
As announced back in conjunction with Jump Festa, these drawings will be repurposed as double-covers for a new complete set of the 42-tankōbon run of the Dragon Ball manga in Japan.
Saikyō Jump is currently a monthly magazine published in Japan by Shueisha under the “Jump” line of magazines. The magazine began as a quarterly publication in 2012, went monthly in 2013, went bimonthly in late-2014, and returned to a monthly format in 2021 (including a digital release for the first time). The magazine’s focus is spin-off and supplementary manga series aimed at a young audience, while also including game promotions, news coverage, and more.
For calendar year 2019, Shueisha reported Saikyō Jump‘s circulation down at 130,000, with readership as 58.5% upper elementary school, 28% lower middle school, 11% middle school, and 2.5% high school or older.