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The story
On 5ch’s News VIP board, a thread starter’s flat declaration that “Dragon Ball is the greatest manga” drew fierce pushback from One Piece fans.
The debate expanded into a full comparison of the two series — foreshadowing, thematic depth, how each portrays its cast of companions — before spiraling into an unresolved argument over what “greatest manga” even means.
What people said
It's not that One Piece fans won't say it — they can't say it.
Chidori couldn't exactly say "we're the top" in front of Downtown, right? (comedy duo analogy: a junior act can't claim to outrank a legendary senior one)
Gundam isn't even manga to begin with, plus it's a different category — those fans probably think they're already the top of the robot genre anyway.
No, the point is: if you're gonna call it the greatest manga, back it up with an actual explanation.
"It's popular" alone doesn't cut it — that's no different from Demon Slayer.
You need substance to talk about, like people can with One Piece.
For what it's worth, I can flatly say One Piece is better than Dragon Ball.
And I can actually explain why.
You could talk for hours about nothing but the side-branch Carddass trading cards.
Plus, even Tezuka praised it (Osamu Tezuka, the "god of manga").
Weak, weak~ ♡ (a mocking taunt — "zako zako," meaning "weakling, weakling")
Re: #21
It's just people punching each other, isn't it?
What do you even mean by "high density"?
Oh! That's interesting! Go ahead and explain it!
For one, it doesn't have random, aimless power inflation.
And the worldbuilding never falls apart.
Oh, okay then…
It introduced real, proper foreshadowing for a shonen manga.
Monkey D. Luffy
Gold Roger
↓
Gol D. Roger (Volume 17)
What's that supposed to mean?
"Oh, okay then" — that's no different from a Demon Slayer fan.
I'm asking what's actually amazing about One Piece, and when you answer with stuff like Re: #46 or Re: #54 — things basically every manga does — of course all you get back is a reaction like Re: #49.
It's impressive that a top-tier hit shonen manga takes on the topic of discrimination and actually sees it through to a resolution.
Dragon Ball doesn't do that, sure, but it's basically the textbook example of power inflation to begin with.
Umm… could you try to understand Re: #68?
Every manga develops its own original story — if it did the same thing as some other work, that would literally be called plagiarism.
One Piece, like every other manga, develops its own unique story, so being told "that's amazing" about something every other manga does as a matter of course doesn't actually make One Piece amazing.
Dragon Ball couldn't pull this off, could it?
Same goes for Re: #67, too.
Isn't it just stuff like "actually, this is what was really going on" or "actually, he had an older brother" — the same kind of thing Dragon Ball did with the Red Ribbon Army or the Gero father-son reveal?
https://wakatake.zashiki.com/wj/wj506btaiyo.html
Check this out — you can see it was tackling discrimination from quite early on.
Side note:
Arlong suddenly flying into a rage, shouting about it almost like he'd personally "been discriminated against."
> But hey, as he got older, he probably got embarrassed about spending his life drawing childish shonen manga
Look at Re: #88 and 89 — you can see it's been handled since volume 6.
So? What about Dragon Ball?
Did it just keep doing Anpanman-style slugfests all the way to the finale?
Weren't you the one saying "One Piece is shallow"?
Where's that "greatest manga" now?
Buggy, Kuro, and Krieg all treated their own crews like garbage, yet Arlong has this bizarrely strong sense of loyalty to his crew (almost like he'd been on the receiving end of discrimination).
The Arlong Pirates covering up their World Noble branding with a sun mark.
And Nami, the one member of the Arlong crew, has a tattoo that looks like her path was completely different from the rest of them.
No agenda means: an absolute evil shows up, everyone unconditionally agrees it's evil and has to be beaten — that's it.
Not trying to make you cry is exactly what it sounds like.
Now compare that to One Piece.
A nation from 800 years ago, criticism of the World Government running the current world, gods, the World Nobles — are they running some kind of sketchy religion over there or what?
It does the whole "kill a character for emotional impact" thing though.
Total tearjerker bait.
Dragon Ball takes that and throws in the thrilling Gohan-awakening attack — and when Gohan comes up short and looks like he's about to die, it keeps the thrill going with Goku's arrival.
Meanwhile, One Piece, come on —
Bell-mère dies and it's "BELL-MÈRE-SAAAAAN!!!"
Vivi begs "please stop the war!" and Nami's on the verge of tears going "you all, stop this war!"
Are you serious right now?
Stuff like Re: #98, or Vegeta's "excess fat" line —
I remember thinking "what a one-trick-pony writer!" at those.
Where does One Piece even come into this?
Piccolo's death was a thrilling development too, since it meant the Dragon Balls would disappear along with him.
But in the end it just gets solved with the Dragon Balls anyway, right?
I mean, I do think Dragon Ball is a fun manga, but if it were being serialized today, I don't think it would've gotten anywhere near this popular.
Never mind that, eat up while you can!
How the Dragon Balls get used is part of the appeal too, you know.
So what's your point?
"Thrilling development" is something literally any manga artist does.
More importantly, "using someone's death as emotional fuel" —
a manga that does that isn't the greatest manga.
It's a one-trick pony to begin with, and honestly, kind of tasteless.
What's gotten into you, suddenly trash-talking One Piece?
Lol, that's a technique One Piece uses plenty too.
Pell, was it? The bird that dies — using a death as emotional fuel, exactly like that.
He's not even dead.
And you call that "doing it plenty" lol
Bell-mère, for one.
Playing it up like a total death, then "actually he was alive after all!" — that's a total buzzkill lol
This whole time you've been calling One Piece shallow, and now you're switching to "simple is best!"?
Try seeing it from my side for once.
It tackled the idea that revenge breeds more revenge, an endless chain with no real solution — and while it couldn't offer a clear answer, it was a work that posed that question to its readers.
Now, how about One Piece by comparison?
Is it even trying to tackle that kind of problem?
No — One Piece only ever brushes the surface, leaves readers with some tidy platitude, and calls it done.
Well, setting aside whether a socially-conscious work like Naruto is good or bad,
it's nothing like One Piece.
We're talking about Dragon Ball here.
Don't go changing the subject.
Nah, honestly I'm not really into it when an author starts playing "social commentator" and makes social issues the theme — if Dragon Ball had been that kind of work, I probably would've hated it.
A manga for the poorly-educated, kids, and women trying to play social commentator, give me a break.
And a copycat power-inflation slugfest manga isn't for poorly-educated kids?
Just be honest and say "I like Dragon Ball and I don't like One Piece."
It inflates the power levels with proper justification behind it, though.
I just think it's well-crafted manga, that's all.
Background and Key Points
Dragon Ball (1984–1995) and One Piece (1997–present) are both Weekly Shonen Jump flagships, and comparing them is a recurring 5ch pastime, especially on News VIP, a board known for fast-moving, meme-heavy flame wars rather than considered criticism. The numbers matter here even though the thread never cites them: Dragon Ball has sold roughly 260 million copies worldwide, while One Piece is the best-selling manga series in history, with Guinness-certified sales north of 500 million — a gap posters gesture at (“if it were serialized today, it wouldn’t be this popular”) but never actually state.
The thread doesn’t really split on “which is better” so much as on what “greatest” should even measure. One camp treats thematic ambition — One Piece’s early, sustained handling of discrimination through Arlong’s crew, or Naruto’s cycle-of-revenge arc — as evidence of a “greater” work. The other camp argues the opposite: that Dragon Ball’s refusal to moralize, its unembarrassed good-vs-evil simplicity, and its internally justified power escalation are the actual craft, and that “tackling social issues” is closer to a crutch than a virtue. Neither side ever agrees on which axis — sales, longevity, ambition, or economy of storytelling — should decide the argument, so it can’t resolve.
What’s easy to miss is that Osamu Tezuka, invoked in the thread as having “praised” Dragon Ball, died in 1989 — eight years before One Piece even began serialization. His endorsement, often cited by Dragon Ball partisans as a trump card, says nothing about the later work it’s implicitly being weighed against.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News VIP) thread “Dragon Ball Uncle: “Dragon Ball Is the Greatest Manga”.”
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