Haddad conceives of Dragon Ball as a “franchise toy,” a corporate media property that is constantly remixed by its fans in ways that its owners resist but also ultimately embrace: appropriation is essential to the franchise's popularity. Over the past forty years, Haddad argues, Dragon Ball's deployment of familiar tropes, cultural references, and narrative forms―from classical Chinese stories and the films of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan to American franchises like Superman and Star Wars―has invited unique transcultural play. Through diverse examples of how fans use its characters as “playthings,” Haddad shows how Dragon Ball travels across international networked fandoms, highlighting the queer, gendered, and racialized dimensions of this play.

Parsing the dynamics of “sites of conflict” between authorized media and fan content, Next Time on Dragon Ball illuminates how fan engagement across the Americas changes the parameters of what a manga and anime franchise is and can be.

Next Time on Dragon Ball: Playing with a Manga and Anime Franchise is written by Vincent Haddad. Published by Univ Of Minnesota Press (August 18, 2026).

Erica Friedman
Rating:

I actually love that fan studies of anime and manga have become so mainstream. And as an author of one such book myself, I am always open to reading other fan studies books. While I am not a huge Dragon Ball fan, I found the ideas within Next Time on Dragon Ball really interesting, even if sometimes the execution was a bit haphazard. Haddad's writing gets so excited about a topic that it runs off on tangents from time to time, but always circles back to the point.

Forty years of a series is a lot to take on. Haddad generally does a good job, looking at the history of the series, its globalization, Toriyama's influences, the voicing of Goku around the world, and diving into complicated issues of race, sexism, and sexuality in both the pages and as expressed by the Dragon Ball fandom. I found these latter chapters very interesting. I know that the way Bulma was portrayed was always a barrier that put me off the series, so Haddad digging into the essential sexism and racism in the series was quite interesting. Of the chapters, the two on the voicing of Goku and the multiple authorship of the series in fillers explicitly not written by Toriyama were genuinely fascinating.

If you are or know a huge fan of the Dragon Ball series, or the phenomenon of its global popularity, this would be a fantastic book.