Dragon Ball Officially Flaunts Rare Akira Toriyama Artwork of Pre-SSJ Goku

Dragon Ball fans got a nice little surprise this week, and it didn’t come from a new chapter or a trailer. It came from the past. The official Dragon Ball website quietly pulled a page out of its own archive, and it’s exactly the kind of image longtime readers rarely get to see outside of old print runs long out of circulation.

This is the image the mangaka, Akira Toriyama, used as the cover of Volume 5 of the series. The piece belongs to a specific, cozy corner of Goku’s earliest days, long before power levels, tournament arcs against gods, or golden hair ever entered the picture at all.

Dragon Ball Officially Revisits Goku’s Rare Volume 5 Cover Art

Goku from the Dragon Ball manga | Credits: Shueisha

Every other day, the Dragon Ball official site opens up its “Toriyama Archives” series, and honestly, it’s become one of the more underrated corners of the whole website. There’s no big announcement, no flashy trailer drop, just a single scanned image sitting there for exactly 24 hours before it disappears again until the next round. This time, the spotlight lands on the title page illustration from Volume 5 of the original manga, first published in Japan on January 9, 1987. If that date rings a bell, it should.

Volume 5 is the book where the Tournament arc wraps up, and the Red Ribbon Army arc properly kicks off, meaning this artwork comes from a genuinely pivotal stretch of the series’ earliest run, right as the story started expanding well beyond its martial arts roots. What makes the picture itself fun isn’t some big dramatic pose or a fight scene. It’s Goku just standing there in winter gear, complete with a knit cap, looking more like a kid dressed for a school outing than the world-saving fighter he’d eventually become.

The official write-up even points out that the outfit is noticeably more casual and fashion-forward than anything he wears during the actual Muscle Tower stretch of the story. It’s a small, almost throwaway detail, but that’s exactly the charm of these Toriyama Archives drops. They’re not trying to reshape anyone’s understanding of the series. They’re just gentle reminders that Akira Toriyama was sketching little character moments constantly, even for panels that had nothing to do with the plot itself, treating cover art as its own tiny creative playground rather than an afterthought tacked onto the chapter.

Toriyama Archives Dust Off Goku’s Forgotten Winter Fashion Moment

Context matters here too, and it’s worth sitting with for a second. This illustration predates Super Saiyan transformations by a wide margin. Goku hadn’t even left home turf for the wider tournament circuit stakes we’d later see against Frieza, Cell, or anyone wearing a Namekian robe. He was still very much the scrappy kid chasing Dragon Balls alongside Bulma, still years away from anything resembling the golden-haired warrior fans now associate with the franchise’s biggest, most explosive moments.

Seeing him drawn in something as ordinary as a winter coat and knit cap is a small window into how Toriyama treated Goku less like an action hero in progress and more like an actual kid experiencing the world one small adventure at a time. Rather than letting these title pages fade into out-of-print volumes and secondhand bookstores, the official site is slowly digitizing pieces of Toriyama’s original art for a global audience, one rare scan every other day like clockwork.

For readers who grew up on the anime and might never have flipped through the early tankobon printings, this is arguably the easiest way to see them without hunting down old copies. The rotating 24-hour window keeps the series feeling active, and it gives longtime readers a genuine reason to keep checking back, back when nobody browsing that issue could have guessed just how far this scrappy little manga was about to travel.

What are your thoughts on this week’s Toriyama Archives? We’d love to know your opinions in the comments below.

The original Dragon Ball manga is available to read on Viz Media and Manga Plus apps and websites.