Dragon Ball Super Finally Connects Its Anime and Manga Timelines

Dragon Ball Super has finally connected its anime and manga timelines. For years now, Dragon Ball Super has been very murky about how the events of its anime series, manga, and two feature-films (Dragon Ball Super: Broly, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero) all fit into canon. Well, now that the Dragon Ball Super manga has finally ended its hiatus and started a new story arc, it's been made clear that all the recent events of the Dragon Ball manga and movies are all part of the same universe! 

WARNING: Mild SPOILERS Follow! 

In the first chapter of Dragon Ball Super's new "Super Hero" arc, we get the new status quo for the manga, which helps orient us in space and time. 

How Dragon Ball Super's New Arc Connects The Movies and Manga

The first thing that Dragon Ball Super's new Super Hero Arc establishes is that the story is after the events of the previous manga arc, "Granolah The Survivor", which ended with the massive reveal of a new threat to the galaxy: Black Freeza. This new Super Hero arc begins by telling us that Goku and Vegeta are hanging out on Lord Beerus's Planet, training themselves to eventually battle Black Freeza. Beerus is shown being awake; the Super Hero movie claimed he had a fourth-month nap before events of that film kicked off, placing this manga arc before that nap.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, it's made equally clear that this new "Super Hero" story arc takes place before the events of the Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero movie, as many of the characters from that film show up in the manga story, prior to the transformative events of the feature film. That includes Dr. Hedo, who is working privately (before being contacted by the Red Ribbon Army) on a shady scheme using corpses as fodder for his robotic experiments – a scheme we know lands him in jail, where we find him at the start of the Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero movie.

Why Dragon Ball Super's Continuity Matters

The Dragon Ball franchise has a longstanding tradition of having both clear canonical storylines, as well as non-canon story arcs and/or films. That approach was fine in the Dragon Ball Z era, as Dragon Ball's popularity was much more niche, and the concept of big franchise universes didn't really exist. Needless to say, that has all changed in the last decade: Dragon Ball has become a worldwide phenomenon, and the series has been trying to clean-up its continuity as a result. 

The problem is that Dragon Ball's rise to popularity was never regulated: certain characters and/or elements of non-canon stories and/or films became more famous and iconic than canonized stories. A clear example is Broly – a character introduced in a non-canon Dragon Ball Z film, who grew to be so iconic the franchises couldn't ignore him and brought him back for several additional films, finally adapting him into canon with a rebooted origin story in Dragon Ball Super: Broly. 

It's clear that Toei, Akira Toriyama, Toyotaro and the entire Dragon Ball team are now committed to sewing together the franchise into one shared continuity – the question is, will fans find that Marvel approach more satisfying? 

Dragon Ball Super's new manga arc is free to read online.