How an accidental fan art hoax transformed the Dragon Ball franchise (2024)

In 1999, the Dragon Ball faithful witnessed the image of the fabled Super Saiyan 5.

There he was: an immaculately chiseled Goku, pecs and delts where they couldn’t possibly exist, standing aloft and unfazed above another alien battleground. His mane was crystal white; it spiked down his back to meet a regal simian tail and a billowy pair of ivory fight pants. Aesthetically, Super Saiyan 5 merged the hairy, primeval weirdness of Super Saiyan 4 and the angelic excess of Super Saiyan 3.

When the image appeared on prehistoric fan forums of the late ’90s, it was easy to buy in. No one questioned it because no one wanted to break the spell.

”We’d spend hours each day on our 56K modems downloading images of different characters whose names and likenesses were foreign to us, and random, low-resolution video clips from across the different series, including from [Dragon Ball] GT, which had yet to air,” says Derek Padula, a Dragon Ball historian, and the author of a forthcoming book called USA DBZ: The True Power of Dragon Ball Z in America. “All of it was fascinating and novel, and fans shared clips and characters with a lot of excitement. Everyone was trying to put the pieces together of who these people were, and how the Dragon Ball story unfolded.”

The Dragon Ball information trade was slow at the turn of the millennium. Americans were constantly behind the curve, as new episodes debuted in their native Japanese long before they were translated and localized on Cartoon Network’s Toonami. As Padula explained, fans only learned about the concept of a “Super Saiyan 1,” as rumors of a possible “Super Saiyan 2, 3, or 4” trickled through the unofficial Geocities and Angelfire pages that cultivated otaku news. The hearsay made the concept of a Super Saiyan 5 exceedingly plausible. So, despite being authorless, and the fact that it was unwatermarked and presented without a copyright endorsem*nt, the Super Saiyan 5 image was still added to the patchwork timeline. Do a Google image search for Super Saiyan 5 today, and the same portrait pops up on the very first page.

The famed Super Saiyan 5 was a hoax. The image didn’t come from Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama’s pen, nor was it intended as a superpowered drawing of Goku. That’s the first thing David Montiel Franco corrects me about when I reach out to him over Twitter to talk about the fan art that accidentally made him famous.

Courtesy of David Montiel Franco

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The saiyan in question is named Tablos. Franco created him in 1998, when he was 17 years old. Looking at the issue of Hobby Consolas, the Spanish gaming magazine that published Franco’s drawing, you can begin to see how the misdirection started. The stoic, silver-haired Saiyan takes up the bottom corner of a page, alongside with the inscription “Dragon Ball AF.” AF was the name of Franco’s own homebrew manga series — he dreamt up storylines that could take place after the conclusion of Dragon Ball GT, a time where there weren’t any new episodes on the horizon.

”The goal was to innovate the Dragon Ball series [by] creating new characters, new races, and new enemies taking place in the alternative future of Trunks where no Z Warriors existed,” Franco tells me over email. So, in his own personal fiction, Tablos was an unknown saiyan who miraculously survived the destruction of planet Vegeta, and “little by little, would start to know his real identity.”

This was the late ’90s, a time when millions of newborn Dragon Ball fan artists, mostly in high school and middle school, flooded forums with their own rough takes on Toriyama’s classic silhouettes. In that sense, Franco was like any other teenager, mocking up his very own fanime as a way to claim a corner of the DBZ multiverse. The only difference was that Franco’s art was light-years better than the amateurish mockups of his contemporaries. Removed from its original context, it would be easy to believe that it came directly from the Toei mothership.

And that’s exactly what happened. Sometime in the late ’90s, a theoretical Dragon Ball fan scanned that Hobby Consolas page, cropped everything but the majestic image of Tablos, and posted it to a forum, where people inferred that it was Goku transformed into a mythical Super Saiyan 5. Franco’s name was removed from the proceedings entirely, and the community, frothy with the hope for new content, new characters, and new power levels, jumped to the conclusion that it was witnessing a spicy new leak from Japan.

Courtesy of David Montiel Franco

Dragon Ball lifers were particularly interested in that innocuous “AF” in the corner of the drawing, which scanned as a logo for a new series. The fan community eventually agreed that AF must stand for After Future, the hush-hush project that Toei Company was working on to continuing Goku’s journey into higher and higher celestial power plateaus. According to Padula’s research on his Dao of Dragon Ball blog, the internet rarely questioned the veracity of AF. Believing in something as exciting as a Super Saiyan 5 Goku and 100-plus new half-hour shows was a blast. Fans filled in the margins with homemade “illustrations, videos, and episode listings” for the hypothetical AF, which created a bedrock of material that made it hard for any casual to cast doubt.

Franco wasn’t aware of any of this. “After sending and publishing the image in that magazine I started to work and study at University of Alicante and stopped drawing,” he says. For nearly 20 years, he had absolutely no idea that his fan-art was being passed around as an official image from the Dragon Ball brain trust. Meanwhile, people like Padula were eating it up.

”Only the super well-educated fans who had seen the entirety of the series by then, such as by watching the Japanese bootleg VHS tapes, could know that it wasn’t real,” he tells me. “These educated fans created a small dissenting voice in the crowd, but most people remained ignorant of truth and falsehood. There’s so much to learn about Dragon Ball, and so much misinformation, that it can be difficult to tell what’s real and fake.”

An element of doublespeak has always been a crucial ingredient of Dragon Ball fandom, simply because it’s difficult to follow the whims of an enigmatic production company across the Pacific. “Dragon Ball is a series made by a Japanese man who is still alive today, but prefers to remain hidden, while a giant publisher and animation studio produce his works and distribute it to the world,” continues Padula. “If Toriyama were like Stan Lee or another comic creator who was actively involved in the community they helped create, he could have quashed those rumors as soon as they began, and it would have put the final nail in the coffin.”

Today, a random fan can pen a tweet to J.K. Rowling and can potentially receive a fiction-altering nugget delivered right to their door. That’s never been the case with Dragon Ball. The universe is too silly, too unruly, and too stuffed with fringe cases for anyone to be certain they’re standing on solid ground. This is a franchise that deemed an entire television arc, Dragon Ball GT, to be non-canon. So is it really that surprising that the community could be baited by some well-executed fan art? To me, that’s just a lovable symptom of the culture.

Courtesy of David Montiel Franco

As the decades piled on, and the internet accelerated, and more Americans got their hands on episodes of Dragon Ball, it slowly became clear that Super Saiyan 5 — at least in Franco’s interpretation — didn’t exist. The rumor was formally put to bed in 2012, when Padula made it his mission to determine the origin of the drawing once and for all. He lays out all of the detective work on his blog, but basically, he tracked down that issue of Hobby Consolas, examined Franco’s signature in Photoshop, and miraculously found him online. Padula was the first one to inform Franco of the legacy he inconspicuously left in his wake.

”I was totally ignorant about this issue all that time,” says Franco. “The problem was that I was absent, and people didn’t know the real origin of the picture.”

In 2015, Dragon Ball Super premiered, serving as the first entry in the Dragon Ball universe since the late-’90s. It definitely meant that Toriyama was not working on anything called Dragon Ball AF, or a Super Saiyan 5. Given Toei’s general reticence with the press, this was about as close as anyone was going to get to a formal repudiation of the myth.

And yet, the folklore still thrives. Go to the Dragon Ball wiki, and you can find a delightfully in-universe history of the Super Saiyan 5 form, and how Goku was the first to achieve it, and how it differs from the contours of Super Saiyan 4, with absolutely no disclosure that the fiction was generated out of thin air by hopeful fans. Scroll through all the fanart inspired by Franco’s drawing, that drapes the other Dragon Ball characters with the same trappings. (Super Saiyan 5 Gohan! Super Saiyan 5 Vegeta!) The legend has existed for too long for it to ever die. “[It] lives eternal,” says Padula. “Like Shenron.”

The legacy is built on wish fulfillment. If you grew up believing that Franco’s illustration was canon, and that Americans were just around the corner from finally getting their hands on AF, it can be difficult to concede that all of that anticipation was for naught. “’Super Saiyan 5 Goku is real’ is the Dragon Ball version of ‘Elvis Lives!’” adds Padula. “People want to believe.”

Dragon Ball, in its beautiful, absurd sprawl, across countless video games, movies, mangas, and dubs, encourages its viewers to distort their discernment. Super Saiyan 5 will be passed around for eons. It belongs to the fans. It’s as real as anyone wants it to be. Given how other, more contemporary fan manga series like Dragon Ball New Age and Dragon Ball Multiverse continue to thrive, the dose of non-canon daydreaming may be a positive force.

Franco has greatly enjoyed his discovered celebrity. In 2016, for the first time since he set off for university, he started drawing Dragon Ball art again, encouraged by his friends, who told him how many people in the community still thirsted for the AF mythology. Last year he went to several manga conventions with his canvases in tow. When he sets up his booth, behind him always is that same fierce portrait of Tablos. Super Saiyan 5 Goku has lifted a lapsed fan artist out of exile, and returned him to his rightful place. Franco isn’t an official arbiter of the canon, but he’s also not not that either. The Dragon Ball universe is full of contradictions, it makes sense that the reality surrounding it would be the same way.

”The majority of people don’t believe that I’m the original creator, other people ask me, ‘When will the Dragon Ball AF anime start?” he says. “I feel like another simple Dragon Ball fan who grew up with the series. Hopefully I could collaborate with Toei Animation in the future. We would have an amazing Dragon Ball series. I promise.”

Luke Winkie is a writer and former pizza-maker from the hills of Rancho San Diego, who lives and works from Austin, Texas.