The Man Who Said No to Akira Toriyama 500 Times

Before Dragon Ball existed, a young Akira Toriyama sent his drawings to Weekly Shonen Jump - and an editor named Kazuhiko Torishima rejected them, again and again, for eighteen months and roughly five hundred pages. This is the true, documented story of the most important person in Dragon Ball's history who never drew a single panel of it: the telegram he sent to a disqualified contest entrant, the brutal rejections that forged an artist, the suggestion to make a kung-fu manga that became Dragon Ball, the objection that turned Goku from an actual monkey into a boy, and the greatest crisis of the entire serialization - the day Toriyama insisted on letting Goku grow up, and outmaneuvered his own editors to do it. A story about friction, honesty, stubbornness, and the strange fact that Toriyama repaid all those rejections by drawing his editor as a supervillain whose catchphrase was: Rejected. Sources include Kanzenshuu's editor FAQ and prototypes guide, Torishima's 2016 Forbes interview, and published Toriyama-Torishima interviews.