Dragon Ball is probably my favourite comic ever so I have a lot of time for its creator, Akira Toriyama. That said, the more I read of his non-Dragon Ball work - Dr. Slump, Sand Land, and now Jaco the Galactic Patrolman - the more I realise that he’s unfortunately a one-hit wonder!
Jaco is an alien policeman who crash-lands on Earth, meets an inventor and a pop star stand-in, and goes on a series of unfunny, uninteresting “adventures”. It’s 200 pages of pointless crappy manga.
Then Toriyama takes a bizarre left turn in the last 50 pages. I’d been thinking up to then that Jaco looked a lot like Freeza and that Tights was a dead ringer for Bulma - well, turns out Jaco is connected to Freeza and Tights is Bulma’s older sister! I honestly didn’t know this when I picked it up but it turns out that this is a Dragon Ball prequel?! (I hadn’t understood that the markings “DB-11, DB-10, etc.” at the start of each chapter stood for “Dragon Ball Minus”!)
So we see Goku’s crash-landing on Earth as a baby, meeting his adopted grandfather Son Gohan, and there’s a short story set on the homeworld of the Saiyans, Planet Vegeta, featuring Goku’s doomed birth parents, Burdock and Gi-Ne, which wasn’t bad. It was totally unexpected and slightly lifted the otherwise miserable experience of plodding through this one.
Generally, prequels are unnecessary but can sometimes prove their worth by being entertaining; Jaco the Galactic Patrolman is neither necessary nor entertaining. For Dragon Ball completists only.
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