8 Comics That Almost Had Better Endings

The original Dragon Ball series was written and illustrated by Akira Toriyama from 1984 until 1995 in the pages of Weekly Shōnen Jump. By the time Toriyama concluded the series, it has been told in 519 individual chapters, which were collected into 42 tankōbon volumes, making for a particularly long manga.

The series spawned an anime, and with it, a media franchise was born, but by 1995, Toriyama was ready to move on. He had worked on it consistently — with few breaks — for more than a decade, and he had other projects he wanted to get to, so the 519th chapter was his last.

While the ending wasn't bad, there were a number of fans who felt that it was rushed, and didn't close up some of the characters in a way they would have liked. Fortunately, Toriyama wrote a second ending, but the world didn't find out about it until the 2000s when Dragon Ball Kanzeban (Perfect Edition) was released.

The ending was altered for the Kanzeban to include the original narrative Toriiyama wrote nearly a decade before, but with some tweaks. In it, Goku passes the torch to Uub, as he did originally, but the new ending also passed over the Nimbus Cloud. This was a callback to Goku's origin when he was a child, and it tied the series together perfectly.