Any influence of Fist of the North Star on Dragon Ball's original production?

[Ssj3Engels]

Can Hokuto no Ken be considered *THE* precursor to Dragon Ball? Did it influence it? If so, was it in a minor or major way?

Or if not: what manga(s), if any, influenced DB?

[UltraInstinctRorikon]

Definitely had some inspiration as it laid the groundwork for a lot of shonen. I'd also credit Astro Boy.

[jjgp1112]

Torishima said he basically pointed to Hokuto No Ken and told Toriyama "See that? Do that but less preachy."

[Adamant]

Or if not: what manga(s), if any, influenced DB?

Toriyama has specifically mentioned Ring ni Kakero as a manga he had in mind a lot, and it probably had a fair bit of influence on Dragon Ball.
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=46695&p=1716919

But Toriyama was in general not that big a manga reader and was mostly inspired by film. Jackie Chan movies are probably the closest you can get to calling something "*THE* precursor to Dragon Ball". Toriyama was a big Jackie fan.

[Ssj3Engels]

Definitely had some inspiration as it laid the groundwork for a lot of shonen. I'd also credit Astro Boy.

Ok, but HnK is technically shonen or seinen???

[MasenkoHA]

Definitely had some inspiration as it laid the groundwork for a lot of shonen. I'd also credit Astro Boy.

Ok, but HnK is technically shonen or seinen???

It's shonen. It was published in Weekly Shonen Jump just like Dragon Ball

[Adamant]

Definitely had some inspiration as it laid the groundwork for a lot of shonen. I'd also credit Astro Boy.

Ok, but HnK is technically shonen or seinen???

It's shonen. It was published in Weekly Shonen Jump just like Dragon Ball

The original series was, but all later continuations and spinoffs have been published in seinen magazines (initially Weekly Comic Bunch, then Monthly Comic Zenon after the former folded, plus a short spinoff in Big Comic Superior). So it depends on what you consider "HnK". The franchise hasn't been aimed at little boys for 34 years.

[Neo-Makaiōshin]

Later content being published in seinen magazines doesn't change the fact that the original work was published on a shonen magazine and considered suitable for the demography reading the shonen magazine.

[Adamant]

Later content being published in seinen magazines doesn't change the fact that the original work was published on a shonen magazine and considered suitable for the demography reading the shonen magazine.

Obviously. As I said, it depends on what you mean when you say "HnK". Is Zamasu a Dragonball character?

[Ssj3Engels]

Just to clear things up, I read in some online article that Hokuto no Ken/HnK was actually seinen. And it seemed plausible, because the series is very violent and (at least in my country) it is considered unsuitable for underage people. Hence my question.

But hopefully we can all indeed agree that it is shonen (the original series/manga, that is).

[Kunzait_83]

To help further clarify:

Fist of the North Star was absolutely, 100% considered Shonen in its original run. And it was hardly unique in this regard.

Shonen as a demographic in manga and anime was overall a great, GREAT deal more risque and artistically diversified from the late 1960s up through to the mid-1990s. What people largely think of today as "Shonen" (the "Big Three" dominant era where Naturo, One Piece, Bleach, and their assorted ilk basically singularly define the landscape for most), where a large amount of the most popular material has been greatly homogenized, has only really existed as the dominant status quo of the demographic since around the late 1990s/turn of the 2000s or so.

Prior to that point though, the anime/manga landscape overall (Shonen included) was a great, great deal different. Almost unrecognizably so for a millennial-aged fan (or younger).

A lot of this comes down to the rise (and subsequent fall) in popularity and dominance of Gekiga and alternative manga. Gekiga refers to a particular style of manga and anime art, which is heavily axed a great deal more on realism and extreme detail rather than simplistic, minimalist, cartoon-like features. This style of manga art has its roots in underground/countercultural manga art of the 1960s. During that same decade, a manga publication known as Garo became a central hub for cutting edge "outsider" manga artists with medium-challenging and expanding ideas and ways of drawing and conceptualizing manga storytelling.

It cannot in anyway be overstated what a MASSIVE impact Garo had on manga for the subsequent 30+ years of the medium's history following its debut. For several decades, Garo had cultivated (or otherwise impacted) some of the greatest and most landmark artists of the medium's history, from Suehiro Maruo to Sanpei Shirato (who helped found Garo), Murasaki Yamada, Yoshiharu Tsuge, Tadao Tsuge, Yoshihiro Tatsumi (who literally coined the term "Gekiga" to differentiate this style of manga art from more mainstream, commercial fare), and on and on and on down a mind-blowing who's who list of definitive, medium-defining artists.

And most notably, it had a VERY sizable impact on one Osamu Tezuka. Yup, THAT Osamu Tezuka. Even by the time Garo had first debuted in the mid-1960s, Tezuka was already the most prolific mainstream artist working in the manga/anime industry. Tezuka was well known to have fallen head over heels in love with the Gekiga art style and its associated works within the alternative/underground manga scene and in the pages of Garo in particular. To incredibly vast degrees. To the point where Tezuka would start his own Gekiga/alt-manga-focused publication COM.

The influence that those works would have on Tezuka's later manga can in no way be overstated, and they are largely credited for the more "grown up" storytelling and subject matter of a lot of Tezuka's latter works.

The impact that this style of manga would have on mainstream manga artists would in no way be solely relegated to Tezuka (though he played a BIG role in mainstreaming it) - another prolific mainstream manga artist by the name of Go Nagai would also become a devoted fan and incorporate it heavily into his own work - and very soon Gekiga and the overall sensibilities of Garo-style alternative manga would become the new mainstream: for awhile at least.

Mainstream manga publications, including yes Weekly Shonen Jump, would begin courting over alternative manga artists en masse, and very soon what used to be a countercultural niche became a big, big part of the face of manga for over the next two or three decades. In a lot of ways, the rise and fall of Gekiga and alt-manga as a mainstream movement very eerily mirrors the mainstream rise (and subsequent fall) of hardcore punk and grunge music in the late 1980s and 1990s in the United States.

Fist of the North Star, and other similar titles like it (from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure to City Hunter to Rokudenashi Blues, Guyver, and an endless amount more, including historical titles like Barefoot Gen), all owe their entire existences and bursts of popularity to this whole movement of manga art and its rise to prominence during the late 1960s into the 1970s.

So what made the wheels finally come off and relegate this stuff back into (in some ways, very needlessly) niche obscurity? Honestly, a ton of various factors, some cultural and most economic. Dragon Ball's meteoric success often gets a whole ton of the blame heaped onto it: I myself personally have always found that while it does share a good deal of the blame, I personally think putting most of all of it onto DB's shoulders is overstating and oversimplifying things and minimizes a host of other factors.

Chiefly though, I've always thought it came down primarily to economics and the capitalistic hunger for ever increasing profits. Dragon Ball gets a lot of blame from folks because it set an insane precedent that manga publications sought desperately to replicate in the wake of its ending, and the chase for more dollars in an increasingly unreasonable stratosphere of profit standards did a lot to help push this sort of manga and anime back out of the mainstream and back into the underground.

That being said though, I do also put at least SOME degree of blame on fans as well, at least here in the Western world, for just a general lack of historical awareness or curiosity. This type of manga and anime has had enough of a cultural impact in Japan that its almost impossible for it to have ever fully faded from the public view or consciousness, but the abject utter and complete lack of almost ANY awareness for a lot of this stuff (at least until relatively very recently in the last maybe 7 or 8 years or thereabouts) on the part of millennial Western fans throughout the entire 2000s and a good bulk of the 2010s can in no small part come back to just plain sheer fucking laziness and a lack of basic intellectual curiosity for anything outside of a very narrow nostalgic comfort zone. Particularly since a lot of this stuff has always been in no way whatsoever hard to find in manga & anime circles, *especially* with a tool as comprehensive and omnipresent as the internet readily available to most.

In any case, while stuff of this ilk like Fist of the North Star that were once ultra-popular has been "grandfathered in" into the 21st century (albeit now as Seinen, rather than Shonen: its long been very, VERY commonplace for such titles that once fell under the Shonen demo to be rebranded as Seinen in the wake of the 2000s), for the past 20+ years or so, its been exceedingly more difficult for this type of material to find mainstream success: in Japan, and even WAY more so in the West. There's been a few notable outlier exceptions throughout, and even fewer of them under the Shonen demographic, but nothing that in any way matches this style's heyday in the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s.

[VegettoEX]

I like to share this fairly often: this is a quick little gallery from the 1983 No. 52 issue of Weekly Shonen Jump with one photograph from each series represented within the magazine. Really gives you a view into the wide variety of series that were represented within the magazine at that time (and not that it's in question here, but how "shonen" is certainly not a genre)-

https://imgur.com/gallery/cWKDY0W

(This is almost exactly a year before Dragon Ball began, and that is indeed The Adventure of Tongpoo you see represented here.)

[Kunzait_83]

I like to share this fairly often: this is a quick little gallery from the 1983 No. 52 issue of Weekly Shonen Jump with one photograph from each series represented within the magazine. Really gives you a view into the wide variety of series that were represented within the magazine at that time (and not that it's in question here, but how "shonen" is certainly not a genre)-

https://imgur.com/gallery/cWKDY0W

(This is almost exactly a year before Dragon Ball began, and that is indeed The Adventure of Tongpoo you see represented here.)

I'm glad you chimed in with that image, as its very, very relevant here.

But yeah, to sum up in bullet-pointed tl;dr fashion:

- Titles like Fist of the North Star weren't at all unique for Shonen (or manga in general) in that time, and were quite mainstream in their time

- What your (royal "you") personal conception of manga, or any artistic medium, is from just your own limited experience of it is in no way indicative of what its full scope is or always was

- History matters (because context matters, and history = context), and you should do your best to actually know/learn it if you want to seriously discuss it

- As noted, Shonen is not (and never was) a genre

- History and art are not static, they are constantly always evolving, shifting and changing with time, including long before you ever first arrived there to started paying attention to them: thus the status quo of your point of entry does not in any way indicate the way things always were or the way they always will be (i.e. history doesn't just magically start or align exactly where it was at the point where you first came into things)

- Much of mainstream Western manga & anime fandom's conception of both mediums as a whole is a decidedly warped and skewed misconception that isn't really tethered to historical reality and is largely borne from a combination of ignorance, incuriousness, mass osmosis of incorrect assumptions made about both mediums spread online by kids and teenaged fans at around the turn of the millennium: and those ignorant assumptions and misconceptions continue to persist in part out of a tightly clung-to nostalgia for the turn of the millennium mainstream Western fandom culture (particularly as it centered around broadcast TV anime at the time)

- Exploring very, very far outside one's comfort zone of ANY artistic medium is essential to actually better understanding it and its full scope and history (i.e. stop continuously rewatching your old favorite works over and over and over, and also stop seeking out solely nothing but things that are very similar to the same stuff that originally grabbed you, and constantly strive to branch out more and more to ever increasingly different and unique things that you've never seen or concieved of before; the more alien, eclectic, and unfamiliar, the better)

[Yuji]

I would like to hear your opinion's, Kunzait, on whether you think Dragon Ball influenced Togashi's work. I see a lot of inspiration taken from Dragon Ball both during the Yu Yu Hakusho and Hunter x Hunter runs, but I am ignorant of whether those elements were taken more generally from Wuxia fiction, or from Toriyama specifically.

[Soppa Saia People]

honestly, the only thing YYH takes that's strictly dragon ball as influence, is it's other world in terms of it being ran and having some aesthetic of a bureaucracy and all that. and even then, YYH did way more with that concept then DB ever did. besides that, there isn't that many similarities that aren't just genre conventions, which DB obviously didn't invent.

[VegettoEX]

The afterlife and god hierarchy being bureaucratic is not original to Dragon Ball: that’s embedded in Buddhist/Hindu beliefs. Yama (or "Enma" in this case) as the god of the afterlife is taken wholesale from there, for example.

This is an extremely common character base and set of iconography for these regions, which is why you’ll see them pop up time and time again in various series.

It’s not the best analog, but it’s like having a reference to King Arthur with a sword in a stone (which, incidentally, Dragon Ball also has!), and that not inherently being a Disney reference.

[Soppa Saia People]

The afterlife and god hierarchy being bureaucratic is not original to Dragon Ball: that’s embedded in Buddhist/Hindu beliefs. Yama (or "Enma" in this case) as the god of the afterlife is taken wholesale from there, for example.

sorry, maybe i got it wrong and worded it incorrectly, i'm at the doctors, but i thought the like, setting of it being salary men with ties and ran like a modern (well, 1988/1991) office was a dragon ball original thing ?

[Ten na nGael]

sorry, maybe i got it wrong and worded it incorrectly, i'm at the doctors, but i thought the like, setting of it being salary men with ties and ran like a modern (well, 1988/1991) office was a dragon ball original thing ?

If you're interested it would be taken pretty heavily from Chinese folk beliefs where the afterlife is run like the Old Chinese (Han - Qing dynasty) bureaucracy. You'd see this updated to the modern era in modern Chinese fantasy novels. Look up "The Celestial Bureaucracy".

[NeoKING]

gem.

Listen to me.

At the moment of typing this, I have only half read your post. But I’ve been reading manga for close to 20 years, and what you are saying is undoubtably my most favorite, insightful post I have ever seen on this site and possibly Dragon Ball (by proxy) as a whole for me. Meta-fandom level information. Thank you, for real.

[SavageDragon]

Very cool info and insight for sure! They were really on fire in the 80s. As for current titles, I hope there's still plenty of eclectic and cool gems out there, sure is a sea to sift through.