Removed from its original context, it would be easy to believe that it came directly from the Toei mothership.Īnd that’s exactly what happened. The only difference was that Franco’s art was light-years better than the amateurish mockups of his contemporaries. In that sense, Franco was like any other teenager, mocking up his very own fanime as a way to claim a corner of the DBZ multiverse. This was the late ’90s, a time when millions of newborn Dragon Ball fan artists, mostly in high school and middle school, flooded forums with their own rough takes on Toriyama’s classic silhouettes. So, in his own personal fiction, Tablos was an unknown saiyan who miraculously survived the destruction of planet Vegeta, and “little by little, would start to know his real identity.”
DRAGON BALL FUSION GENERATOR FAN ART SERIES
”The goal was to innovate the Dragon Ball series creating new characters, new races, and new enemies taking place in the alternative future of Trunks where no Z Warriors existed,” Franco tells me over email. The stoic, silver-haired Saiyan takes up the bottom corner of a page, alongside with the inscription “ Dragon Ball AF.” AF was the name of Franco’s own homebrew manga series - he dreamt up storylines that could take place after the conclusion of Dragon Ball GT, a time where there weren’t any new episodes on the horizon. Looking at the issue of Hobby Consolas, the Spanish gaming magazine that published Franco’s drawing, you can begin to see how the misdirection started. Franco created him in 1998, when he was 17 years old. That’s the first thing David Montiel Franco corrects me about when I reach out to him over Twitter to talk about the fan art that accidentally made him famous.
The image didn’t come from Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama’s pen, nor was it intended as a superpowered drawing of Goku. Do a Google image search for Super Saiyan 5 today, and the same portrait pops up on the very first page. So, despite being authorless, and the fact that it was unwatermarked and presented without a copyright endorsement, the Super Saiyan 5 image was still added to the patchwork timeline. The hearsay made the concept of a Super Saiyan 5 exceedingly plausible. As Padula explained, fans only learned about the concept of a “Super Saiyan 1,” as rumors of a possible “Super Saiyan 2, 3, or 4” trickled through the unofficial Geocities and Angelfire pages that cultivated otaku news. Americans were constantly behind the curve, as new episodes debuted in their native Japanese long before they were translated and localized on Cartoon Network’s Toonami. The Dragon Ball information trade was slow at the turn of the millennium. Everyone was trying to put the pieces together of who these people were, and how the Dragon Ball story unfolded.” “All of it was fascinating and novel, and fans shared clips and characters with a lot of excitement. ”We’d spend hours each day on our 56K modems downloading images of different characters whose names and likenesses were foreign to us, and random, low-resolution video clips from across the different series, including from GT, which had yet to air,” says Derek Padula, a Dragon Ball historian, and the author of a forthcoming book called USA DBZ: The True Power of Dragon Ball Z in America.
No one questioned it because no one wanted to break the spell. When the image appeared on prehistoric fan forums of the late ’90s, it was easy to buy in. Aesthetically, Super Saiyan 5 merged the hairy, primeval weirdness of Super Saiyan 4 and the angelic excess of Super Saiyan 3.
His mane was crystal white it spiked down his back to meet a regal simian tail and a billowy pair of ivory fight pants. There he was: an immaculately chiseled Goku, pecs and delts where they couldn’t possibly exist, standing aloft and unfazed above another alien battleground. In 1999, the Dragon Ball faithful witnessed the image of the fabled Super Saiyan 5.