Rating: Summary: The beginning of a great series... Review: This book is definetly the start of what has now become a well known series. The adventures of Goku and his friends to search for the legendary Dragonballs, show the road from childhood friendship to adulthood dillemas. If you are a fan of Dragonball Z, along with the millions of Americans, I suggest on reading this book. Getting a better understanding of what happened during Kakkarot's (Goku) childhood years will help you better understand the Dragonball Z series. Also after reading this book, I found it more entertaining to read then watch the T.V. series.
Rating: Summary: 6 out of 5 dragonballs! Review: This has to be the best idea! Putting the comics all together into volumes. I don't know why people say "its hard to read right to left!" Thats the charm of it! Just be happy that the words aren't read right to left! This is about Goku (the strongest boy in the world), who lives by his self, and meets Bulma. There adventures are sidesplitting. All in all, DO buy this, its dead funny and makes a great collecyion. 6 out of 5 dragonballs!
Rating: Summary: Review of Dragon Ball Volume 1 Review: This is a great book. However, it's censored a little, which can be a bad thing at some times. Its censorship doesn't completely take away from the overall story, though. In fact it is censored very little. There's nothing wrong with it. In fact, if you've seen the videos of the original Dragon Ball, this is much better in that it isn't censored even half as much, as the videos were heavily edited. This is a great book, and a must-have for Dragon Ball or DBZ fans.
Rating: Summary: The Best English Version of Dragonball. Review: This is the best version of Dragon Ball involved in English. Even though it's censorsed, it's only a 1/100 as much as the television show is. The parts that are censored only one part is really messed up is that they took out some of the scenes from the No Balls part of it. The nudity which was edited out was cleverly taken out but bubbles and exclamination. But if you like Dragonball, and want a close to perfect version this is it to get.
Rating: Summary: No longer censored! Review: When I first wrote this review all of two years ago, I reported that this volume, for all its effort in getting a (mostly) true-to-the-original version of the Dragon Ball manga to US audiences, was unfortunately censored. However, as of a year ago (so I'm a little late with this edit here...), this is no longer the case.Physically, the book is somewhat larger than its Japanese counterpart...I'm not sure if this is the first edition or not, although the price leads me to believe that this is. If you'd like a slightly more compact version, look for "Dragon Ball Vol. 1" (the title under which Amazon has the Shonen Jump version) instead. If this version here truly is the outdated first edition, it'll disappear soon enough, and that'll be the end of that discussion. But anyways... Content-wise, this is basically the same as it was in the comic book form (waaaay back 5 years ago, as of this writing). All text and sound effects are redrawn in English, but left in their right-to-left format, as with all of Viz's Shonen Jump comics. As I metioned before, this volume is indeed uncensored, and all of the dirty jokes are left in (so all you sukebes should rejoice). Overall, the translation's decent; it suffers a little bit in that being the first volume, things were still being adjusted while the rewriter (Gerard Jones) found his niche for the series. For example, Goku's backwoods accent is a bit overly pronounced, as are Chi-Chi's and Gyuumaou's. This volume also does more embellishment of the translation than is present later on. There's nothing bad enough to change the meaning of the dialogue, but compared to the later volumes, which are very close to a direct translation, it stands out. (It's also interesting to note that 5 years later, Viz seemingly _still_ hasn't caught on to the fact that the Dragon Balls' names are Chinese, as they still opt for more-or-less a romanization of the katakana which are there to help the Japanese readers pronounce the words). Overall, this is a fun read, and if I were you, I wouldn't hesitate to buy it. Although...if you know Japanese, you might want to opt for the recent re-released "Kanzenban" (perfect edition) of the Japanese manga, since it's the original (and has all the color pages in color, too!). For English speakers, though, this is the next best thing, and there is nothing which should really prevent you from getting it.
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