Dragon Ball, Vol. 2

Overview

Dragon Ball, Vol. 2 picks up the serialized story Akira Toriyama began in the manga's debut volume, following the boy Goku as his training under the eccentric Master Roshi deepens and his search for the magical Dragon Balls continues. The storytelling keeps the loose, episodic rhythm typical of early Dragon Ball, moving between lighthearted interludes and tournament-style sparring that tests Goku's growing strength.

As the cast widens, Toriyama layers in rival fighters and competing treasure hunters, giving the volume a stronger sense of stakes than the series' opening chapters. The artwork remains loose and cartoonish, with exaggerated expressions and fluid action sequences that would become a hallmark of Toriyama's style and an influence on decades of manga and anime that followed.

Humor stays central to the volume's tone, often veering into broad, body-based gags alongside the martial-arts plot. That mixture of slapstick comedy and earnest adventure is part of what has made the series durable across generations of readers, even as it has occasionally drawn scrutiny for the same juxtaposition.

A Formative Entry in Global Manga

Dragon Ball occupies a particular place in the history of manga reaching Western readers: it was among the series that introduced many English-language audiences to the conventions of the medium, from right-to-left panel flow to the tonal whiplash between comedy and action. Volume 2 sits early enough in the run that it still carries the loose, gag-manga sensibility of Toriyama's earlier work, before the series hardened into the more continuous action epic it would later become.

That transitional quality is part of why the early volumes are often discussed separately from the Dragon Ball Z era that followed. The humor here is broader and more physical, closely tied to the manga traditions Toriyama was working within at the time, and it reflects editorial norms for serialized boys' adventure comics in Japan that did not always translate neatly into American school and library contexts decades later.

Why Dragon Ball, Vol. 2 Has Been Challenged

Dragon Ball is widely credited with shaping the modern popularity of manga and anime in the United States, and Toriyama's inventive character designs and comic timing are frequently cited as reasons for the series' lasting appeal. Challenges to this volume, however, have focused on content rather than craft, reflecting a gap between how the book is remembered by fans and how it reads to some parents and educators encountering it in a school library setting.

Most objections center on the series' comedic use of nudity and sexual innuendo, which appears as part of its slapstick humor rather than as a dramatic plot element, but which some reviewers consider inappropriate for the younger readers who make up much of the manga's audience. Concerns about violence tied to the volume's fight scenes have also been raised, generally bundled with the nudity complaints rather than argued separately. In this catalog, Dragon Ball, Vol. 2 has been formally challenged in 1 state and 1 district, with the objections consistent with the broader pattern of concern applied to manga aimed at young readers.