Crush of Plasmatic Flesh: Dual Reproduction of Characters and Abjection in Manga Dragon Ball

This paper analyzes the mechanism of the proliferation and disappearance of graphical characters in the manga Dragon Ball, a globally successful media franchise. Dragon Ball was serialized by Japanese manga artist, Toriyama Akira (1955-2024), in Weekly Shonen Jump magazine between 1984 and 1995. The manga, published in 42 volumes, was animated for TV from 1986 to 1996 as Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z.

In support of the arguments on animation, such as Susan Napier's metamorphosis, Sergei Eisenstein's plasmaticity, and theories on characters in anime and manga studies, this paper analyses visual properties of characters in Toriyama's Dragon Ball, with a special focus on the graphical and biological reproduction.

This paper found that characters in Dragon Ball operate as a vessel for the shape-shifting fluidity of ink lines. The free kinetic movement of lines results in the graphical proliferation of characters and reproduction devoid of sexual expression. This is a version of the "abjection" - a reaction of the subject to reject familiar things as something horrific - that Napier argued regarding metamorphosis in turn-of-the-century Japanese anime. In Dragon Ball, muscular men's battles hide the potentially grotesque graphic/biological proliferation of the characters. What stops this medium-specific proliferation of images is light as the lack of ink, a media-aesthetic element inherent to manga and anime. It is not flesh-and-blood combat but energy waves that inflict death on the villains who resurrect even from a single cell, just as lines drawn in ink multiply endlessly.

These findings offer rich insights into the history of visual popular media in post-war Japan. The glow of the energy waves expressed by the lack of ink echoes the repeated motif of mass destruction in the history of Japanese anime and manga, which reminds us of the extinction of lives in the atomic bomb explosions.