Akira Toriyama is always going to be known as the man who created Goku. Dragon Ball and the sprawling, almost unending media franchise that it spawned will always be the most important part of his legacy, but it wasn’t the only manga that the man created. Dr. Slump was the manga that helped launch Akira Toriyama’s career as one of the most successful mangaka of all time, but his later work, Sand Land, might be the best non-Dragon Ball manga Akira Toriyama did, and it is criminally overlooked.

When the Dragon Ball manga ended in 1995, it would have been easy (and justifiable) for Akira Toriyama to rest easy for the rest of his life. He had not one but two hugely successful works to his name. Though it hasn’t achieved the kind of success that Dragon Ball has, Dr. Slump was still a hugely successful manga in its own right. Toriyama didn’t need more money, and he certainly didn’t need anything to add to his legacy; it was more than secure at that point.

However, the thing about creative people is that they don’t tend to stop creating. That instinct isn’t something that you can just turn off, so Akira Toriyama continued to draw manga, which would usually be published by Shueisha, because you’re not going to turn down work by Akira Toriyama, are you? Much of the work that came out during this period is simple one-shot stories, usually leaning into the comedy that always played a large role in Toriyama’s work.

And then, there is Sand Land. This short, 14-chapter series feels so different from what Toriyama had produced up to that point. It takes place in a world where water has all dried up, and a king (appropriately named King) has given himself a monopoly on water and follows the fight to free the people from this situation. The manga combines the comedy that has always been at the heart of Toriyama’s work (even Dragon Ball was really a gag manga that eventually became a more focused action story by the end) with his true passion, which is drawing vehicles.

Even without the character designs, which all have the trademark Toriyama Look to them, you can feel his passion for this project. As the anime adaptation was announced, Toriyama said that he felt this could be his final work as a mangaka, and he wanted to put everything he had into it. There is humor, but more than that, you have the kind of effortless worldbuilding that the man was so good at. This is a world of demons and tanks, princesses and old west sheriffs. A hodgepodge of genres and influences all thrown into a Mad Max-style world, and yet, because the characters accept it as their reality, so do we. That is why Dragon Ball can have dinosaurs chasing Gohan and anthropomorphized dogs running countries alongside aliens, time travel, and a whole cosmic pantheon.

The other thing that makes Sand Land so special is that it showcases Akira Toriyama’s deep hatred of bullies and tyrants. Just like Frieza represents the real estate developers who helped crash the Japanese economy in the late 80s and early 90s, King feels like a stand-in for every billionaire hoarding wealth to the detriment of the world around them. That is the kind of villain that makes Sand Land feel more relevant in the more than 20 years since it was written. Because every time we win a fight against inequality, we always seem to find ourselves back in that fight again.

I’m not going to argue that Sand Land is as good as Dragon Ball, and I certainly won’t say that it will ever have the same kind of pop culture presence as Toriyama’s other work. However, it manages to distil everything that I love about Akira Toriyama – the artwork, relatable villains you desperately want to punch, the mixture of silliness and action – into 14 chapters. If you want to find out what kind of artist Akira Toriyama was and don’t want to read all of Dragon Ball, Sand Land is the perfect gateway.

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