Manga Review | Dragon Ball Full Color Freeza Arc
I’ll start by saying I’ve never read a Dragon Ball manga. In fact, I’ve never even seen the anime, and I’m a child of the 90’s so it was on TV when I was younger. This of course means I was so confused. Like literally, I wasn’t sure who to root for. I mean the manga says Dragon Ball Full Color Freeza Arc so I thought maybe he, Freeza was the one I should support, but he’s just so boring.
Actually, I spent a good portion of the manga rooting for Vegeta. Now this might just be my inner love of bad guys, because I did root for Draco Malfoy and Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter too…but I digress. Anyway, I was super confused a first, though as I got into the manga I began to understand the perspectives of the characters as well as who the good guys were.
I know it’s not a great idea to jump into the middle of a series that’s well established, but if you’ve never picked up Dragon Ball before today, start with this manga. It’s action packed to the point where you’ll never get bored while reading. Akira Toriyama’s story hooks you from the get go, and two hundred plus pages later you’re feeling withdrawal symptoms because you need Volume Two.
After his epic battle with Vegeta, Son Goku and his friends must obtain the wish-granting Dragon Balls in order to resurrect their fallen allies! Their search will take them all the way to the planet Namek, where the evil Freeza, and his minions are slaughtering the Namekians in order to fulfill Freeza’s wish for immortality. What will it take to defeat this great evil?
This manga arc is setting up to be an epic quest about a group of friends who save the world while saving themselves. The manga begins in the heat of the action with Goku’s son and his friends who go to Namek where they begin the search for the Dragon Balls. There’s very little Goku in this volume, he’s not involved in any of the fighting action, however his presence in still felt in the manga, and Vegeta more than holds his own as the focal point for carrying the storyline forward.
If you’ve forgotten, this is Dragon Ball “Full Color” Freeza Arc, which means the manga is in full colour as opposed to the black and white of a classic manga. The manga’s dimensions are also larger than normal, and this makes for an entirely different reading experience. Reading a manga in full colour is like watching an anime on mute, but with subtitles. You get the full effect of what the artist wanted to share.
Instead of using shading to denote changes in a character, Akira uses lines and colour to provide the same effect. His style is almost chibi in nature with chubby cheeks, and lack of hard, angular edges. Nevertheless, there’s nothing cute about these characters.
Final Verdict
Akira Toriyama created a winner with his Dragon Ball series, and Dragon Ball Full Color Freeza Arc continues the trend of being an amazing manga. This manga arc will be three volumes long, and each will be released every quarter with Volume one being released on May 3rd, 2016. Dragon Ball Full Color Freeza Arc will be available in physical copy and digitally via the Viz Manga App as well as other popular book distributors in the US and Canada.
The copy of this manga used for this review was provided by it’s publisher, VIZ Media.
