What is the King Piccolo Saga?

The 22nd World Tournament ends and Krillin is found dead, murdered for a Dragon Ball. The killer serves Piccolo Daimao, a demon sealed centuries earlier by Roshi's master Mutaito, now freed by Pilaf. Piccolo wishes for his youth restored, kills Shenron himself so no one can undo his work, and conquers the world capital in a sequence that reads nothing like the comedy of two years earlier.

Toriyama has said in interviews that he wanted a truly evil villain, and the change is structural as well as tonal: named, loved characters die and stay dead for the length of the arc, the Dragon Balls are destroyed, and Goku wins only by punching through Piccolo's chest with his last strength, losing the use of his legs in the same moment. Piccolo's dying act, spitting out an egg containing his reincarnation, sets up both the next arc and the Piccolo of Z.

The tankobon volumes covering the arc are a shelf marker for the series' transformation: covers darken, and the final volume of the fight is among the most reprinted in Japanese editions because schools and libraries replace worn copies constantly. The 1986 anime follows the manga closely here, one of the stretches where anime and manga track almost scene for scene.

For collectors the arc matters as the dividing line used by Japanese guidebooks between early and mature Dragon Ball. First printings of these volumes, and the Jump issues carrying Piccolo's death, are the kind of paper that surfaces rarely in clean condition because the original readership was young and the books were traded heavily.