Dragon Ball tankobon vs kanzenban: which edition should you buy?
The tankobon are the books as Japan first collected them: 42 volumes released from 1985 to 1995, standard small format, with the covers Toriyama drew as the series ran. Those covers are documents of their moment, movie-poster style group art early, stark duels later, and they are what most Japanese readers of the era actually owned. Printings are numerous, so individual tankobon are easy to find and cheap in Japan, with early printings of key volumes the exception.
The kanzenban, or Perfect Edition, re-collected the whole manga in 34 larger volumes between 2002 and 2004. Everything material improves: bigger pages, heavier paper, the magazine color pages restored in color, and brand new cover art drawn by Toriyama for every volume, typically a single character against a clean ground, which many collectors consider his finest sustained cover work.
Two kanzenban features exist nowhere else. Several chapters gain small additions, and the ending is revised: Toriyama redrew and expanded the final sequence for this edition, so the series literally ends differently depending on which edition a reader owns. The Library's Buu saga page covers what changed in story terms.
The practical advice splits by purpose. For reading Japanese with furigana support and living with the books daily, tankobon are light, cheap, and replaceable. For display, art, and permanence, the kanzenban is the edition Japanese collectors themselves treat as definitive, and its volumes hold value in a way common tankobon printings do not. English readers get neither directly: Viz's editions derive from the tankobon, with the 3-in-1 and box set formats covered in the Library's Viz editions page.
