Making a manga is a process that takes too much work. The illustrators submit to long hours full of pressure due to the times required by the publishing houses. Akira Toriyama did not have a good time during the development of Dragon Ball Z. It was a situation that led him to take a break that lasted almost 20 years.
The pressure to publish, because the anime had already caught up with the manga, led Akira Toriyama to say enough is enough. You can then imagine the number of sketches and drafts that have been discarded by the directors of Shueisha in the content generation rooms.
We have seen plenty of illustrations of this style. Different versions of Cell, Gohan’s clothing, Frieza sketches and even Super Saiyan 3 transformations have slipped through social networks, thanks to the special editions of Dragon Ball published by the same publishers.
The old sketch that we bring today is not that of a specific character. These are old versions of the Dragon Ball Z logo made by Akira Toriyama, which were discarded before reaching the final one.
What was the Dragon Ball Z logo going to be like?
There is an old myth that Dragon Ball Z was actually going to be Dragon Ball 2 (two). But someone on the team confused the number with the last letter of the alphabet, everyone liked it and that’s why it stayed the way we know it.
If this is true, then came the logo creation process. According to images rescued by the site 3D Gamespublished at the time by Shueisha, this is how the Dragon Ball Z logo was going to be.
Not all versions feature the cartoonish Shenlong or Japanese lettering message. In some cases there is only Dragon Ball Z and nothing else.