What Toyotaro Drew for Dragon Ball Super’s 2019 Summer Fair

Son Goku Dragon Ball Super Natsucomi 2019 Mini Shitajiki by Shueisha

A Piece of Japanese Stationery With a Second Life as a Collectible

A shitajiki is something every Japanese schoolchild knows: a firm, flat plastic sheet slipped beneath writing paper to create a smooth surface and prevent ballpoint impressions from bleeding through. From the 1980s and 90s onward, publishers began printing popular anime and manga characters across these boards, and they quickly crossed over from classroom supply to collectible. The non-commercial versions — those stamped “Not for Sale” and distributed through bookstore campaigns — became a category of their own among fans drawn to official, hard-to-replicate pieces.

This particular mini shitajiki is smaller than the standard B5 format, approximately postcard or A6 size. It is printed in monochrome line art and carries the Shueisha imprint clearly on its face, confirming it was produced and issued directly by the publisher — not through a toy manufacturer or licensee.

Dragon Ball Super and the Manga Line This Item Belongs To

The franchise on the board is Dragon Ball Super, Akira Toriyama’s authorized continuation of the Dragon Ball story he began serializing in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1984. The manga version launched in Shueisha’s V Jump magazine in June 2015, with Toyotaro handling the artwork under Toriyama’s supervision. An anime adaptation ran on Fuji TV from July 2015 to March 2018, but this item belongs firmly to the manga line — the copyright notice credits Bird Studio, Toyotaro, and Shueisha, which is the exact rights structure of the V Jump manga.

The character pictured is Son Goku, the series’ lead protagonist: a Saiyan warrior whose uncomplicated drive to grow stronger, combined with a fundamental goodness, has made him one of the most recognized fictional characters in the world. Here he is drawn wearing a snorkeling mask and snorkel — a summer-themed illustration that appears to be original campaign artwork, distinct from anything in the manga’s story pages. Below the image, Toyotaro’s signature is visible. Born in Spain and publicly chosen by Toriyama as his approved successor on the manga, Toyotaro carries his own following among international readers who followed the series’ continuation closely.

The Natsucomi Campaign and How This Item Came to Exist

“Natsucomi” is short for Natsu no Comics Fair — Shueisha’s annual summer promotion run through Japanese bookstores. It is entirely separate from the doujinshi event known as Comiket. Each year, readers who purchased qualifying volumes at participating retailers received non-commercial bonus items. The distribution was time-limited, store-limited, and confined to Japan; there was no parallel overseas release and no way to obtain the items after the campaign window closed.

In the summer of 2019, Dragon Ball Super’s manga was deep into the Galactic Patrol Prisoner arc, which had begun in December 2018 — a period when the series was expanding its readership again following the anime’s conclusion the previous year. The Natsucomi piece from that moment captures a specific point in the franchise’s timeline: a publisher-direct, campaign-exclusive item that was never sold at retail and never distributed through any official channel outside Japan.