Post
by Kunzait_83 » Sat Aug 09, 2014 6:28 pm
Pretty sure long, long many moon ago I made a thread here about exactly this artist/art style.
I've no idea who he (or she?) is myself, but without the slightest doubt he's/she's always been my hands down favorite Dragon Ball artist from pretty much moment one of my getting into it. Yeah, I even kinda like this person's style better than Toriyama's. Heresy I know. Sue me. Its a lot sharper, sometimes more elegant, and does the "angular" look that so many people bitch about in the manga a whole lot more justice. I personally find it to be without a doubt the best a lot of the characters have ever looked generally, outside of some of the REALLY high end animation and some of Toriyama's more jaw dropping high points in the manga. And as noted, the shading and coloring on all these are just superb and second to none. The coloring on some of the more recent official artworks just look awful and sad in comparison to these.
I've been working for years now to collect as many high quality scans of those images as I could find. They basically pretty much all but single-handedly DEFINED the look and feel of Dragon Ball Z's entire presence (online and offline) throughout its entire original run during its early to mid 90s heyday. Hell, they pretty much played a significant role in getting me initially hooked into the series in the first place. Most of them come from posters/wallscrolls, box art, print/magazine ads, and also calendars and pencil boards (pencil boards were a big, big collector's thing in anime circles all throughout the 90s: don't ask me why). A whole bunch of my old avatars I used to use on here (the Dragon Ball related ones that is) came from these.
As someone earlier noted, there's a site called Minitokyo that has a LOT of them in ridiculously high quality. That's an excellent place to start, but of course it hardly has all of them. A long while ago I toyed with the idea of making a whole site devoted solely to gathering and displaying these particular art pieces in the best quality available. Even now I sometimes wonder about possibly making a tumblr page or something for it.
Apart from Minitokyo, its really, really stupidly hard to find a lot of these in halfway decent quality nowadays. Harder than it used to be even way, way back in the early-mid 90s. I think its gotten a lot harder in part due to not only the passage of time, but also moreover all the new official art pieces filling up the void in the interim and clogging up image searches. By comparison, older series from roughly the same time period as DBZ that haven't had so many damn revivals (like Yu Yu Hakusho or Slam Dunk or Ranma 1/2 and the like) are a LOT easier to find their original 90s promo artwork in very good quality.
Really, really glad someone made another thread for this. Hope more info on the artist and more higher res images starts eventually coming about.
http://80s90sdragonballart.tumblr.com/
Kunzait's Wuxia Thread
Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.
