Naho Ooishi

Naho Ooishi is the official Shueisha manga artist most closely associated with the chibi side of Dragon Ball. Her first franchise credit came in March 2009 with the manga adaptation of the 2008 OVA Dragon Ball: The Return of Son Goku and Friends!, a two-chapter piece that showed she could draw Toriyama's cast in a way readers actually recognized. Shueisha liked it enough to give her bigger work, and in December 2010 she launched Dragon Ball SD in Saikyō Jump, a gag remake that retells the original Dragon Ball story in super-deformed style.

Her most talked-about job, though, is Dragon Ball: Episode of Bardock, the short 2011 manga in which Goku's father travels back in time and famously becomes the first Super Saiyan. It was her first original scenario for the franchise, spun out of the arcade game Dragon Ball Heroes, and it gave her the rare honor of writing a new canonical-feeling beat into the Bardock legend.

Ooishi started out as a dōjinshi artist working under the pen name Gichi before Shueisha hired her in 2009 and relaunched her career under her real name. That path is still unusual in the Dragon Ball world, where most side-material artists come from inside the Shūkan Shōnen Jump editorial pipeline. It also made her one of the first women to hold a long-running creative post on official Dragon Ball manga, at a time when the franchise's wider creative roster was almost entirely male.

Beyond Dragon Ball, she writes Oh!! New Gadget Super Lovers, an ongoing comedy series about a super-elite gadget news crew called the Onyu Tokusentai, which is openly a parody of the Ginyu Force. In 2013 she also drew Battle of Gods SD, a one-off Dragon Ball SD chapter celebrating the introduction of Beerus in the Battle of Gods feature film, published in Saikyō Jump on March 4, 2013.

Her relationship with the franchise is not just illustrative. In the March 2014 issue of Saikyō Jump, released in February of that year, Ooishi interviewed Akira Toriyama himself, putting direct questions to him about Bardock's family, the Saiyan race, and the Frieza race. It is one of the few published Toriyama Q and A sessions of the Super era conducted by a working Dragon Ball manga artist rather than a career journalist, and the answers fed back into her own storytelling.

For readers, Naho Ooishi's work sits in a sweet spot. Dragon Ball SD is the easy, funny entry point younger fans use to learn the classic saga, while Episode of Bardock is exactly the kind of short, emotional side story the hardcore crowd keeps returning to. Both started on her drawing board.