PART 23 of 52 ONESHOTS in 52 WEEKS
鳥山明の『ピンク』 “Pinku” by TORIYAMA Akira
Many will know Akira Toriyama as the author of Dragon Ball, one of the best selling manga series of all time. Dragon Ball began publishing in 1984, just two months after the conclusion of comedy manga Dr. Slump, the author’s preceding series, which had also enjoyed great reception. The inception of both of these series grew at least somewhat from oneshots, with author Toriyama penning no less than thirty short works throughout his career.
In Japan, many of these oneshots are collected in the three-part anthology Akira Toriyama’s Manga Theater, with publisher Viz combining the trilogy into a single-volume English-language version in 2021. This week, I’m looking at the oneshot Pink, which was published in Jump Fresh magazine in 1982, and was thereafter collected in the second volume of Manga Theatre.
Set in a drought-ridden land, a young girl named Pink makes a living as a bandit, stealing water from courier vehicles belonging to the the Silver Company, who have a suspiciously abundant supply of the elusive H2O. Finding an umbrella amongst her mother’s old things, Pink wishes she could enjoy the rain again, and decides to hit the Silver Company headquarters to steal as much water as she can get.
Pink is an exceedingly fun action-adventure story which contains many parallels to early volumes of the Dragon Ball manga, which would often see Goku and friends get up to all sorts of hijinks in episodic escapades, commonly with a ‘monster of the week’ villain. Released half way through the publication of Dr. Slump and less than a year before Dragon Boy, the oneshot prototype which would eventually become Dragon Ball, Pink acts as an interesting bridge between the two series, combining the comedy Toriyama was known for with the sense of adventure beloved in his later work.
Akira Toriyama’s artwork is ever distinctive, making use of bold, uniform lines in crafting brilliantly diverse-looking characters, whose liveliness yields the manga an exciting and enthusiastic flow. The artist has expressed a love of drawing vehicles and animals, but puts an spin on typical concepts with his unique designs, drawing sci-fi automobiles and quirky gadgets, alongside all manner of creatures, from anthropomorphic characters to animals with a dinosaur-esque resemblance.
The author doesn’t use as much shading as was seen in other shounen manga of the time, especially in the backgrounds, with an emphasis instead on expression and foreground action, perhaps owing to his roots in comedy and gag manga. Toriyama also almost completely disregards screentone, with only sparing use in Pink. Resultantly, the ‘white space’ is much more prominent in Toriyama’s manga, but his characters, objects and environments are no less defined, with the intricate foreground detail allowing scenes to really ‘pop’ on the page.
Pink is a fine display of Toriyama’s mastery in creating comedic adventure stories, which quickly immerse readers into wonderfully imagined worlds inhabited by abundantly memorable characters. The action is engaging, with Toriyama illustrating outlandish gun skirmishes between the charismatic Pink and the extravagant mafioso-esque Silver Company, and the whimsical and self-referential humour is very effective. The oneshot is a brisk 30 pages long, but still double the length of a typical chapter in Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball. Comically, for an author adept at creating short chapters, he often leaves a sizeable impression.
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Morning, Roo 