ドラゴンボール (Dragon Ball)

Eiichiro Oda has said it as plainly as anyone says anything: Dragon Ball is why he draws manga. He read it as a child, decided that was the job, and has talked about Toriyama as the person he most wanted to be read by. What carries over is the architecture of the genre Toriyama built: a journey structured as a sequence of destinations, a crew that accumulates, an escalating ladder of opponents who are beaten and then absorbed into the cast, comedy and enormous violence in the same panel, and a hero defined by appetite and good humour rather than by brooding. Toriyama drew a crossover one-shot with Oda in 2006, and Oda's tribute when Toriyama died in 2024 said the same thing again.

Masashi Kishimoto has described copying Toriyama's drawings as a child and has named Dragon Ball as the manga that made him want to make manga. The inheritance is structural. The tournament arc as a way of introducing a whole cast and ranking it; training as the thing the story is actually about; the power ceiling raised again with each arc so that last volume's villain becomes this volume's ally; the loud, hungry, underestimated hero. Kishimoto's own tribute in 2024 described Dragon Ball as the thing he had been chasing his whole career.

Tezuka set the terms every later shonen artist worked in, and Toriyama has named him as the figure he grew up reading, alongside Disney. What is inherited here is form rather than plot: weekly serialisation with a cliffhanger an episode, cinematic panelling with speed lines and impact frames, big round eyes and simplified faces on bodies drawn with real anatomy underneath, and a boy hero whose strength is the engine of the story. Filed MEDIUM rather than HIGH because it is a whole-tradition debt rather than a specific borrowing: the map already records Tezuka's direct line to Akira.