An original Dragon Ball portrait has sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars in a recent auction, beating out a signed piece of art from the late Berserk creator, Kentaro Miura.
A user on X (formerly Twitter) shared a side-by-side image of two hand-drawn anime portraits of Guts from Berserk and Son Goku from Dragon Ball, along with their respective sale prices after the auction. According to the user, the Berserk portrait, which features a detailed depiction of Guts' face, sold for $43,000, while the Goku drawing netted over $100,000 in an upset they called "unbelievable."
Both Miura and Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama are widely considered legends within the manga community for their contributions to the medium and their iconic work on series often hailed as all-time classics. However, Toriyama's work significantly outshone Miura's in terms of sale price, netting over twice as much despite being much less detailed.
Miura's drawing of Guts is a fully finished piece of art featuring specific details on the character's face and in-depth shading, resembling a piece of art directly from the pages of Berserk. Toriyama's piece, on the other hand, is a simple sketch featuring a basic pen outline of Goku with the artist's signature underneath it. Particularly given that Miura passed away in 2021, leaving behind an ongoing manga series whose older volumes have skyrocketed in price ever since, the situation resulted in confusion among fans, many of whom expected Miura's work to net a much higher value.
Still, some fans have defended the price, stating that while both creators contributed a great deal to the industry, Dragon Ball and Toriyama himself are simply more broadly known even outside the anime fandom. Aside from creating and writing the Dragon Ball series and many of its follow-up entries, Toriyama is also known for his work as a character designer for the Dragon Quest series of video games, which are similarly influential in the role-playing genre. Additionally, he created several other longstanding anime franchises like Blue Dragon and Sand Land, the latter of which is set to receive a video game adaptation of its own.
While Berserk enjoys a sizable fan base of its own, Miura's work is not as widely known, as his flagship series only received a few short-lived anime adaptations that mostly failed to gain widespread positive acclaim or mass financial success. Although the original Berserk anime did receive warm reviews, it was quickly canceled due to budgetary restrictions after only a handful of episodes, leaving Miura's work relegated to the pages of his own books.
Source: X (formerly Twitter)