What is the Pilaf Saga?

Dragon Ball began in Weekly Shonen Jump in November 1984 as a gag adventure, not a fighting series. Bulma, searching for the Dragon Balls to wish for a boyfriend, meets Goku, a wild boy with a tail and a staff who has never seen a city, a car, or a girl. Their road trip west gathers Yamcha, Puar, Oolong, and the Ox-King's daughter Chi-Chi, while the tiny Emperor Pilaf schemes to wish for world domination.

The arc's tone is the point collectors miss when they start at Z. Jokes carry the chapters, fights are short and silly, and Toriyama's art is round, dense, and full of vehicles and signage he plainly loved drawing. The wish, when it finally comes, is famously wasted on a pair of panties, a gag that sets the series' early rule that power matters less than character.

In the collected editions the arc fills roughly the first two Japanese tankobon volumes, and the cover art of those volumes, Goku and Bulma on a motorbike and on the dinosaur-haunted road, is among the most reproduced Toriyama imagery of the 1980s. English editions kept the art but the earliest Viz printings were a larger trim size, later replaced by standard tankobon format.

For a physical shelf, Pilaf-era material is where a Dragon Ball collection starts: the first tankobon volume, the first anime episodes from 1986, and the 1986 film Curse of the Blood Rubies, which retells this arc with a different villain. Condition on early Japanese printings varies widely because they were read hard by children, so clean early volumes command attention out of proportion to their original cover price.