Dragon Ball Super Artist Toyotarou has long been a fan of the Dragon Ball series, as loyal a fan as you can get. However, he certainly surprised some fans with his choice of his favorite Dragon Ball Z storyline, and that choice sheds light on a controversial Dragon Ball Super storyline.
Toyotarou became Akira Toriyama's artist when Dragon Ball Super began in 2015 and worked with the man until his untimely death in March 2024. But Toyotarou had been a Dragon Ball fan long before that, first making waves with his fan manga, Dragon Ball AF, back in 2000. As a fan who rose to the creative level for a beloved franchise, Toyotarou largely understood what the Dragon Ball fandom wanted to see and was responsible for some of Dragon Ball Super's most important moments, like Vegito's return in the Future Trunks arc.
However, when asked about his favorite Dragon Ball Z storyline, he had a very unusual answer.
Toyotarou's love for Great Saiyaman inspired Super's least favorite arc
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In an interview around the time of the release of Dragon Ball Super volume 1, translated and maintained by the fan site Kanzenshuu, Toyotarou was asked what his favorite part of Dragon Ball was. He replied, “I really liked the beginning of the Majin Buu arc, when Gohan attended Orange Star High School. I guess because it was so laid back,” a statement that Toriyama himself agrees with. Toriyama even said that he “wanted to continue with the ‘slice of life’ stuff…” but needed a new enemy to appear, which eventually led to the creation of Buu.
This is a rather surprising answer, as many fans didn't really like that part of the series because it was so different from the majority of Dragon Ball Z. It's perhaps no surprise that while working on Dragon Ball Super, Toyotarou and Toriyama created something of a sequel to the Great Saiyaman storyline in the form of Goten and Trunks taking on the Saiyaman identities X-1 and X-2. This arc was originally the original Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero movie, but was expanded into a separate short story arc in the manga shortly before the manga began directly adapting the movie's storyline.
Toyotarou is known to have had quite a bit of input into the stories Toriyama wrote, so he may have simply seized the opportunity to put his own spin on his favorite arc from DBZ. Luckily, while Dragon Ball Super's High School saga isn't the most popular, it's also one of the shortest, spanning just three chapters of the manga, so fans who don't enjoy the school setting as much as Toyotarou don't seem to have suffered too much. Still, one can hardly blame Toyotarou for sneaking in a little more of his favorite element to the series, and Dragon Ball Super still good as ever