Seed of Might presents raw, cleaned scans of the Kanzenban release of the original Dragon Ball and Neko Majin manga. The Kanzenban was a high quality re-release of the complete Japanese Dragon Ball manga that was released starting in 2002.

Physical copies of all 34 volumes (plus Neko Majin and several Daizenshuus) were acquired by SoM member Tokimeku Panic and scanned page by page by Seru in 2022, with the intention of attempting to do a complete retranslation of the manga as both the official VIZ and current fan translations have strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately the scope of such a project ended up being beyond our skillset, and despite our efforts at recruitment we were unable to get into a consistent groove that would enable all 520 chapters to be translated and typeset within any reasonable timeframe.

Instead, last year SoM member AndroidxFusion pivoted to leading an effort of painstakingly cleaning and leveling the raw manga in order to release it for other more experienced groups to use as a base, both for English and other language translations, as well as for anyone who wanted to enjoy the manga in its original form.

For black and white pages (the majority of the scan), we opted for a near-bitonal look. For color pages, hue shifting, color selection, color balance, vibrance and other methods were used to maintain color saturation, brightness and accuracy. A hue list with intended saturation levels and brightness levels was used to keep a certain level of consistency for each phase in Toriyama’s stylistic changes throughout the series’ lifespan.

The scans have been rendered in 600dpi, are collected by volume in .cbz format, designed to mimic the look and feel of the physical Kanzenban release. The .cbz files can be opened with any comic reader, although we recommend ComicRack CE, YAC Reader, or CDisplayEX (although it should be configured to display the first page as a cover). You can also change the file extensions to .zip to look at individual pages and reorganize things to your preferences.

Extras include high quality scans of the first and last chapters (including the original ending) from Daizenshuu 2; the key art, spines, and full dust jacket reconstructions from each Kanzenban volume; and individual reconstructions of all 2 pagers.

Anyone can use these for their own projects, just please credit us.

CREDITS

Project Lead - AndroidxFusion
Materials Acquisition - Tokimeku Panic
Scanning - Seru
Scanning Support - Ronin559, Romao
Cropping and Straightening - AndroidxFusion, JySzE, wreflect, butler, iggy2000, lategsi, Hikari, iKaos
Color Restoration - AndroidxFusion, doncanjas
Quality Control - AndroidxFusion, wreflect, butler, RedDeadEncode, Ploffy, Hikari, Tokimeku Panic, iKaos, Ajay, Tracksuit, vanner64, Krycek7o2
Research - Romao, doncanjas, CiceroCiceronis, CSManiac33, MistaL, iKaos, JoyconBoysForever, SpeedyBoi, Ajay

Additional thanks to those who helped with translations, transcriptions, and typesetting phases of the project before it was abandoned.