There is one massive art form that has been apart of my personal life as an artist and also a fan. It surrounds my personal guilty pleasure but also links to my way of how I see art the way I enjoy it. My personal appreciation comes from a manga series created in 1984 named Dragon ball created by Akira Toriyama. Finding out about the franchise at the age of 10 I first became a fan of the anime series and watched it religiously after school on the cartoon network channel. So obsessed I had to buy empty tapes and record all the episodes every day as well until it came out on VHS.
Some few years passed and the series finally was released on DVD. Searching online to find out more episodes that weren't released in America I browsed and became more involved on the art style. I used reference from the manga books and copied the style over and over, wanting to be able to learn how to draw the character's from memory. I become heavily interested in comic books and manga was highly being noticeable in America more through the years. I started collecting the entire Dragon ball Z manga series.
I remember spending hours on end drawing the characters that I tend to love and grow up with over the years. The back stories, character development, theme, everything that this series had, this world was the one I wanted to be in when I wanted to get away from the real world around me. In the situations the series had, it made me really think about life and also helped me relate when I had my own problems I had during my childhood with friends and family. If something happened I knew I would always turn to this series and expressed myself by drawing out my frustration making the characters in a situation I was just in.
To many people I’ve talked to, they say this is just another typical fighting ‘cartoon’, however I see it as something much more deep. Currently I am now a fan of this series for 12 years and still to this day I go back to that art style, admiration and understanding that only a hand full of people get. I had the opportunity to talked to other artists online all over the world and some I had the pleasure of meeting, sharing the same similarities and gratitude. I couldn’t stand here and tell you if Dragon Ball Z weren’t in my life I would be still drawing and wanting to be an Illustrator.
Maria, thanks for workshopping this review. I hope you got a lot out of our discussion of it. I think it's an interesting topic--in fact I'd really love a few links to help me learn more about it on my own. And while you do a good job explaining why and how you got involved with the Dragonball world, I think John Berger would ask you to think about how it changes the way you see other kinds of work. What critical dispositions is a dragonball enthusiast liable to be prone to?
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