Dragon Ball Cosplay Retrospective On Mangaka’s Passing
Akira Toriyama, the manga creator responsible for many popular manga works, but most notably Dragon Ball died last Friday, March 1, at the age of 68. According to his Bird Studio, which announced his passing yesterday, Toriyama died suddenly of a blood clot in his brain.
Launched in 1984, Dragon Ball manga works have sold more than 260 million copies globally. Anime adaptations of Dragon Ball as series or movies continue to this day. Disney+ has been working on an adaptation of his manga Sand Land, launched in 2000. That show is planned to launch sometime this spring.
I’ve been taking photos of Dragon Ball character cosplay since I began photographing cosplay at conventions around 2010. Below is a gallery of most of those photos. I say most because I am sure I missed some — I skimmed the archived galleries pretty quickly given the timeliness of the news, so I am sure I missed a few. For example, I am sure I have taken at least one photo of someone cosplaying Majin Buu, and one of Mr. Popo (although not finding the latter might be for the best). Neither of those photos are in this 71-image gallery.
The character most represented in the gallery is Bulma, in her various looks and costumes. After that is probably the Androids, specifically Android 18, although Android 17 makes a solid showing, even one version in the MIR long-sleeved t-shirt. After that, to my surprise, is Goku himself, mostly in super-Saiyan form. I didn’t recall taking that many photos of Goku, so I was surprised to see such strong representation. If you count them as a general category, Saiyans and super Saiyans make up the bulk of the photos. And there are even two versions of Master Roshi, one cosplayed by none other than Ani-Mia herself. Oh, and one Krillin. Props to the cosplayer for portraying the Dragon Ball equivalent of South Park‘s Kenny, created and killed off long before Kenny existed.
We offer our condolences to Toriyama’s family, friends and many, many fans.
Cosplayers in this gallery include pandanopants, finnyoak, midgardiancosplay, sycosplay, Ani-Mia, Everybody Loves Tony Ray, Jay Justice, princessgigglesnort, colombian__otaku, fen.allard, and many more.
We now use Smugmug to present cosplay photo galleries and will post all photos there, with a link to each gallery in its own gallery article. This will allow us to give you higher resolution images to download — still for free.
To view the entire gallery, just click on the image below. If you are pictured in any of our galleries, feel free to download the images and use them non-commercially on social media, with appropriate credit.
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