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Manga Guide

Dragon Ball Chapter 055

Tankōbon Title Page
Tankōbon Title Page
Kanzenban Title Page
Kanzenban Title Page
Full Color Title Page
Full Color Title Page

赤いリボン

Akai Ribon

A Red Ribbon

Chapter Information

Premiered: 20 December 1985 (Weekly Shōnen Jump 1986 #05)
Corresponding: Dragon Ball Episode 034, “The Heartless Red Ribbon”

Availability:
  • Digital Monochrome Edition Volume 05 (12 October 2012)

Chapter Synopsis

Some time has passed since the Tenka’ichi Budōkai. Goku flies through the air on Kinto-Un in a wooded, mountain-ish area, and he stops at a river for a drink. He checks the Dragon Radar Bulma gave him, and there’s a Dragon Ball just to the northeast. Meanwhile, at two capsule houses with a pickup truck outside, a cowboy has just woken up. Another guy in a trench coat, wearing a scarf around his neck, tells him it’s already 8:00, and the cowboy greets him as Silver. Silver tells the cowboy to get off to work, and so the cowboy gets in the truck with a fox guy. Silver says that Commander Red wants them to find “it” quickly. Brown Company already found one yesterday. The truck drives off, and Silver reveals to us that the thing they’re looking for is a Dragon Ball.

The cowboy digs through some bushes, angry about having to search for a small ball in such a big area. The fox guy spots something coming. Goku comes whooshing in, hops off of Kinto-Un, and checks the Dragon Radar. Goku looks around, and the two guys tell him to get out of the way or they’ll kill him. (The cowboy has a gun out.) Goku walks over and finds the Dragon Ball between two rocks. “This has six stars, so it’s the Six-Star Ball. Not Grandpa’s…” The two guys think that must be the Dragon Ball, and Goku asks how they know about them.

The cowboy points his gun at Goku and tells him to hand it over. Goku asks what he’s planning to do with it. The cowboy tells him to hand it over if he doesn’t want to die, but Goku sticks his tongue out at him. The cowboy tries to snatch it, but Goku kicks him off into the distance. The fox guy starts firing at Goku, but Goku dodges the bullets and jumps over towards him. He punches him in the gut, and kicks him off into the distance as well.

Goku picks up the Six-Star Ball and flies off, while the cowboy guy slumps over to the truck and radios Silver. Silver runs out of one of the houses with a missile launcher, and fires at Goku. It’s a direct hit. Goku lands safely, although Kinto-Un is destroyed. Goku’s ticked off, as Silver asks him about his radar and why he’s gathering the Dragon Balls. Goku says he’s not telling anything to him because of what he did to Kinto-Un. “Kid… Don’t mess with the Red Ribbon’s Colonel Silver…”

Chapter Notes

Errata

  • In the first panel of the fourth page, the building that Silver stands in front of is labeled “18” instead of “108”. However, this mistake is hard to spot, since it is cut off by the edge of the page in most collected releases. Only the original printing in Weekly Shōnen Jump (in 1986) and the Digest Edition release (in 2016) manage to keep enough of the “8” on the page to make it apparent.

Vehicles

  • The truck that appears in this chapter is a second-generation Ford F-Series pickup from circa 1953-55. The “FORD” name can be seen clearly on the rear tailgate in the first panel of the fifth page. This is also mentioned in the “Item Dictionary” in Daizenshuu 7.

Author’s Comment

  • Each issue of Weekly Shōnen Jump features short comments from the various series’ authors, giving fans a brief insight into their current thoughts, ranging from series-related announcements to trivial happenings in their personal lives. Akira Toriyama’s comments from this issue were:
    ネコ嫌いの松山君に内緒でネコ飼っていたのが発覚!!す…すいません…許して<明>

    My cat-hating assistant Matsuyama-kun has discovered that I’ve been secretly keeping one!! I… I’m sorry… Please forgive me. <Akira>

    The cat Toriyama mentions is Koge, which Toriyama mentions taking in in his introduction to Volume 3, published on 10 June of this year. In that introduction, Toriyama says this event occurred “half a year ago”, which means that he might have been keeping Koge a secret for several weeks by the time Matsuyama found out.

Page Breakdown

The majority of the Dragon Ball series was drawn in black and white, but chapters were occasionally published with color pages. This breakdown notes how many full-color, limited-color, and black-and-white pages appeared in this chapter. As the tankōbon volumes were not released with these colors intact, any color pages shown are taken from the kanzenban release.