Dragon Ball Z, Vol. 21 (Volume 21): Tournament of the Heavens

In the latest Strongest Under the Heavens tournament, Trunks and Son Goten demolish their opposition in the youth bracket without even trying, and fight one another in the final – but who will get to go up against Hercule? And will he be revealed as the charlatan he is? In the adult tournament, the usual suspects get into the finals as well as some new characters like the mysterious Shin and Kibito. But this tournament becomes truncated as finally Buu (here written as Boo) appears!It says a lot about his skills as a storyteller and artist that Akira Toriyama can take minor characters like Kuririn and Videl, make them the focus of the book, and still make it as gripping to read as if it were Goku vs Vegeta. Those are the only two who have matches in the tournament – the others qualified but having them fly off to meet a separate, bigger threat shows how much they’ve outgrown this setting. It’s also a notable volume for being the first time a female character – Videl – has had a starring match in the series. She gets the crap beaten out of her but still.Goten and Trunks are adorable as they try to sneak into the adults’ tournament standing on each other’s shoulders hidden under a costume as Mighty Mask – and yet nobody’s the wiser! The people in the DBZ world are the most gullible, brain-dead people ever. They see characters flying, firing fireballs, and changing their hair colour instantly, right in front of them, but they still insist everything’s “a trick”. It’d be like if the people in the DC or Marvel universes didn’t acknowledge that Superman or Spider-Man were real! At a certain point, you’ve gotta make the surrounding world acknowledge the superheroes in it.This volume’s (thankfully) a good read after quite a few duds. It’s a classic Dragon Ball-type book with great martial arts action in a tournament setting and I really liked it. That and the Buu storyline kicking off sees the series returning to form. Here’s hoping it keeps getting better and the series ends on a high!

You really get your moneys worth with this. Great art, interesting story and overall a really good manga.

Reading right to left is weird, but it's so worth it! Not bad for a fiver. Came in pristine condition, brand new, nothing wrong with it. Cheers

Its Tournament time and all the warriors have gathered at the Tenkaichi Budokai to see who is the Strongest Under the Heavens.As I mentioned in my review for DBZ Volume 20, the reappearance of the Budokai gave the reader something of a "Early DB" feel and it continues into this volume, not so much in the humour but more of the unique tournament feel that DB always had at the Tenkaichi Budokais, but also thrown into the mix are some vintage DBZ set pieces, which makes for an excellent volume. The Goten Vs Trunks fight at the beginning of this volume in the Junior Division Final is very reminiscent of the Goku Vs Krillin fight from the 22nd Budokai (see Dragon Ball Volume 11); two best friends going at it, competitive, but not necessarily beyond using cheap tricks on each other to get the win.However, the tournament doesn't really begin to open up until Goku along with the others come across two mysterious strangers, one of whom claims to know about Goku and hopes to meet him in a fight at the tournament. It is after this meeting that triggers a chain of peculiar and unusual events at the Tenkaichi Budokai.It is in this volume that sets the groundwork for rest of the Buu saga and Akira Toriyana does a great job of doing this. He does this by slowly building tension, introducing new mysterious characters and creating enough questions in the reader's mind that they won't want to finish the volume until it's completed and most importantly, we hear about the new major villain for this saga for the first time. And on top of all that, this volume features one of the most memorable fights in all of Dragon Ball, with the Videl Vs Spockovich fight. But be warned, this is a very violent fight by DB standards. If you've been following DB from the beginning (or from the start of the "Z" era even) then you'd come to expect a certain level of violence from it. Sure there are occasions where it crosses that line (SSJ2 Gohan killing the Cell Jrs by either chopping off their heads or ripping through their limbs), but it generally doesn't stray too far from it. However, the Videl-Spockovich goes beyond that. It won't be the most violent thing you'll ever see or anything like it, but for DB, it got quite brutal.Again, this is a volume I'd recommend highly, like the previous volume, it's a fairly atypical DBZ volume, where plot mostly takes presence over action, with the addition of the whole "Tournament Vibe" this volume has going on in it, it's another fresh feeling volume, but at the same time packed is with some vintage DBZ set pieces, to keep the fans happy.This is why the whole of DB (DB/DBZ) was so successful for so long. Sure after a certain point (I'd personally say Cell saga) where the basic structure of a DB saga got repetitive and it became a case of a rinse & repeat cycle of that structure with the sagas, but the past two volumes shows how Toriyama masks this, quite frankly, wonderfully, by totally drawing you in, in the prelude for the main course of the saga (Future Trunks' introduction and his slaying of Freeza and his father was the Cell saga equivalent) and during the course of the sagas throws in enough twist and turns so that each saga is unique from the rest, and why in the end it was Toriyama who was the one who called it quits on the manga, and not because of any drop in popularity.