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It looks like Dragon Ball, but it's quite peculiar.
Manhwa in the 70s marked the most scandalous period of the Korean comic industry with a slew of intellectual property thefts and violations. During this time, numerous iconic manga works were plagiarized by Korean artists, such as Queen's Blade, Lady Oscar, Glass Mask, Fist of the North Star, Slam Dunk, and ½ Ranma... Naturally, with worldwide success, Dragon Ball couldn't escape being plagiarized in the Korean market.
The plagiarized version of Dragon Ball is called Red Hawk, created by the artist Sang Wol Ji. Sang Wol Ji is a renowned martial arts comic artist for over 30 years. However, his reputation and success are intertwined with the plagiarized series Red Hawk.
At the time of its release, Red Hawk was another martial arts comic closely associated with the childhood of many Korean readers. However, this couldn't cleanse the stain on the career of the male artist since the Japanese even included the series in a book introducing the plagiarized manga culture of Korean artists in the 70s-80s. Red Hawk became a prime example of how Koreans embraced plagiarizing classic manga works.
In the 90s, Sang Wol Ji copied ideas from mangaka Toriyama Akira (the creator of Dragon Ball) to create Son of the Dragon. The Son of the Dragon series plagiarized and imitated Dragon Ball with an identical cast of characters but a completely different storyline. The series even published 7 volumes in Japan, leaving fans of Toriyama Akira extremely disappointed, believing the legendary mangaka had declined in skill.
During this era, due to the underdevelopment of computers, Korean publishers didn't use the real names of authors for Japanese manga. Instead, they were changed to fake pen names or the names of newly emerging Korean artists. As a result, readers believed that popular Japanese manga were created by Koreans.
The issue of intellectual property ownership for illegally published works posed significant challenges for the Korean publishing industry in convincing renowned Japanese artists to sign publishing contracts for over 10 years. To publish series like Dragon Ball, Glass Mask, Black Jack... seriously in Korea, publishers had to pay very high copyright fees along with strict copyright conditions. However, even with such efforts to rectify mistakes, many mangaka were still dissatisfied with Korean publishers. For instance, artist Takahashi Yoichi's manga Tsubasa - The dream of the soccer field was once pirated, plagiarized, and even had the names of characters and the nationality of the football team completely changed, causing the artist to be very angry.
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