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. Franco created him in 1998, when he was 17 years old. 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. The image didn’t come from Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama’s pen, nor was it intended as a superpowered drawing of Goku. Do a Google image search for Super Saiyan 5 today, and the same portrait pops up on the very first page. So, despite being authorless, and the fact that it was unwatermarked and presented without a copyright endorsement, the Super Saiyan 5 image was still added to the patchwork timeline. The hearsay made the concept of a Super Saiyan 5 exceedingly plausible. 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. 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. The Dragon Ball information trade was slow at the turn of the millennium. Everyone was trying to put the pieces together of who these people were, and how the Dragon Ball story unfolded.” “All of it was fascinating and novel, and fans shared clips and characters with a lot of excitement. ”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 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.
No one questioned it because no one wanted to break the spell. When the image appeared on prehistoric fan forums of the late ’90s, it was easy to buy in. Aesthetically, Super Saiyan 5 merged the hairy, primeval weirdness of Super Saiyan 4 and the angelic excess of Super Saiyan 3.
His mane was crystal white it spiked down his back to meet a regal simian tail and a billowy pair of ivory fight pants. There he was: an immaculately chiseled Goku, pecs and delts where they couldn’t possibly exist, standing aloft and unfazed above another alien battleground. In 1999, the Dragon Ball faithful witnessed the image of the fabled Super Saiyan 5.
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