Last July, Shueisha released an expanded collection of content from Kazuhiko Torishima originally printed within the company’s Saikyō Jump magazine: titled Dr. Mashirito’s Ultimate Manga Technique (Dr.マシリト 最強漫画術), the 196-page book includes a variety of career reflections, advice for upcoming artists, and interviews with colleagues.

New and exclusive to the book was an interview with Akira Toriyama himself, which is the latest addition to our ever-expanding “Translations” archive.

Though the entire early-career retrospective/chat is enlightening, one particular section may garner a little more attention than others:

Toriyama:
That’s the hardest thing about action manga. If you draw it on the same level as the previous fight, it’ll seem to the readers that the level has actually gone down. So I gradually came to believe that there’s a limit to making the characters stronger. In terms of having to take the level of action portrayals even higher, it got quite difficult from around the time the battle with Freeza ended.

Torishima:
That would have been the best place to stop, too. (laughs)

Toriyama:
That’s rich, coming from you. (laughs)

Torishima:
Well, when it got to have such runaway popularity, we couldn’t very well have that, now could we?

An exploration of this exchange — which to most casual readers would appear to be a throwaway comment and laugh between friends — has been added to the respective page in our “Intended Endings Guide” here on Kanzenshuu.