How did Toriyama draw Dragon Ball each week?
Toriyama described his own toolkit without romance. In a published question and answer on his manga technique, he lists Pilot drawing ink, a Zebra G pen (one nib lasting about forty pages at best), ordinary stationers' rulers, and, for color work in his early career, Luma color ink. The process around the tools was just as plain. He used the storyboard as his draft, he said, and it was the one stage he found a bit fun. Meetings beforehand, he hardly ever had them. Inking, he admitted, he had not enjoyed since way back.
The schedule behind Dragon Ball was inherited from Dr. Slump and it was brutal. At the start of that earlier series he had no assistant at all and slept about an hour a day, gradually finding ways to save time on the inking. Contact with his editor Kazuhiko Torishima ran to one phone call a week, ten or fifteen minutes, business only. There was no fax machine. Storyboards and finished manuscripts went by express delivery, twice a week, and Toriyama's own account of the ritual is the stuff of legend: after working all night he would drive the manuscript to Nagoya Airport himself, squinting into the morning sun, unable to tell the colors of the traffic lights. He called it dangerous, and he did it every week.
The famous part is what he did not do: plan. Asked directly whether he drew Dragon Ball without planning ahead, writing it in suspense himself, Toriyama agreed and corrected the flattering version: he had tried to make it sound deliberate, but he simply did not plan because it was a pain. Characters started moving of their own accord as he worked, and he followed them. By the later parts of Dragon Ball the method had become speed itself: once a fight began, he says, he could often go from storyboard to a finished chapter in a single day. His sole assistant carried the inking load, which is why so many of the series' famous shortcuts, the destroyed tournament ring, the uninked Super Saiyan hair, are really labor decisions wearing costumes. The most planned looking manga of its era was, by its author's cheerful confession, improvised weekly by a man who considered keeping a deadline an ironclad rule and everything else negotiable.