Creation and Conception
Akira Toriyama initially based most of the characters on those of the Chinese novel Journey to the West, and redeveloped one of his earlier one-shot manga series, Dragon Boy. To be creative with the character, Toriyama stated that he designed Goku not as a monkey like the Journey to the West character, but as a human-looking boy with a monkey's tail.
During this period of the series, Toriyama placed less emphasis on the imagery, simplifying the lines and sometimes making things "too square"; found problems determining the colors; and sometimes altered them mid-story. For the female characters, Toriyama created women he deemed "beautiful and sexy", but also "strong". Going against the normal convention that the strongest characters should be the largest in terms of physical size, he designed many of Dragon Ball's most powerful characters with small statures.
Additional characters (such as Kame-Sen'nin and Kuririn) and martial arts tournaments were added to give the manga a greater emphasis on fighting. Knowing readers would expect Goku to win the tournaments, Toriyama had him lose the first two while continuing to plan an eventual victory. When having fights in the manga, Toriyama had the characters go to a place where nobody lived to avoid difficulties in drawing destroyed buildings. In order to advance the story quickly, he also gave most fighters the ability to fly, and later granted Goku Teleportation.
Read more about this topic: Immortal Dragon
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