Dragon Ball Super Gallery Project's next entry to be drawn by Blues mangaka Masanori Morita

Modified Aug 03, 2024 10:55 GMT

Wednesday, July 31, 2024, saw X user and reputable general anime and manga news leaker @WSJ_manga reveal the next Dragon Ball Super Gallery Project contributor. This will be none other than Blues mangaka Masanori Morita, who is also the author and illustrator of the Rookies manga.

Morita’s contribution will be one of the last to the project, which was created to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the original Dragon Ball manga series by author and illustrator Akira Toriyama. Sadly, Toriyama passed away in March 2023 at the age of 68 due to an acute subdural hematoma. Toriyama’s series formally turns 40 in November 2024.

Dragon Ball Super Gallery Project enlists mangaka who may be unknown to Western fans for next installment

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Morita may be the least known entrant in the Dragon Ball Super Gallery Project so far when it comes to Western fans due to his most famous works not making the jump overseas. These would be Rookies and Blues, which, while incredibly popular in Japan, never received an official translated release in the West. While Blues has an anime adaptation, Rookies does not, further contributing to Morita’s being a relative enigma when it comes to Western fans.

Morita’s entry will be the 38th overall in the project and will be preceded by author and illustrator Yoshihiro Togashi’s entry as the 37th. Togashi is likely best known as the creative genius behind the Hunter x Hunter and Yu Yu Hakusho manga series, authoring and illustrating both.

With Morita and Togashi’s entries, there will be just four left in the gallery project, which aimed to honor the manga’s 40th anniversary by recreating each of the original series’ 42 volume covers. In anime terms, these manga volumes cover both the original anime and the Z continuation, with the source material for both being published under the former’s name as one continuous series.

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One notable name who hasn’t contributed to the project yet is One Piece mangaka Eiichiro Oda, whom many fans speculate will be the final entrant in the project given his relationship with Toriyama. This is further supported by the fact that Naruto mangaka Masashi Kishimoto, with whom Toriyama also had a mentor-student-like relationship, was the first entrant in the project back in August 2021.

Toriyama’s original manga series first began serialization in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump magazine in November 1984, where it ran until its conclusion in May 1995. The manga’s 519 chapters were collected into the 42 total volumes mentioned above, all of which are available in English translations.

The ongoing Super manga series, which Toriyama was a part of, will be continued by Toyotaro, Toriyama’s hand-picked partner for the manga when it began serialization in June 2015.