Bulma

Bulma
Dragon Ball character
Bulma, drawn by Akira Toriyama
First appearance	Dragon Ball Chapter #1: Bulma and Son Goku (1984)
Created by	Akira Toriyama
Voiced by	Japanese Hiromi Tsuru English See Voice actors
Profile
Aliases	Lena (Harmony Gold dub)
Relatives	Dr. Briefs (father) Tights (sister) Vegeta (husband) Trunks (son) Bra (daughter)

Bulma (Japanese: ブルマ, Hepburn: Buruma^?) is a fictional character in the Dragon Ball manga series created by Akira Toriyama. She makes her debut appearance in the first chapter Bulma and Son Goku (ブルマと孫悟空, Buruma to Son Gokū^?), published in Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine on December 3, 1984, meeting Goku and recruiting him as her bodyguard to travel and find the wish-granting Dragon Balls. Bulma is the daughter of Dr. Briefs; the founder of Capsule Corporation, a company that creates special small capsules that shrink and hold objects of various sizes for easy storage. Being the daughter of a brilliant scientist, Bulma is also a scientific genius, as well as an inventor and engineer. Along with creating the Dragon Radar, a device that detects the energy signal emitted by a Dragon Ball, Bulma's role as an inventor becomes important at several points in the series; including the time machine that brings her future son Trunks to the past.

Bulma is loosely based on the character Xuanzang from the Chinese classic novel Journey to the West. Bulma and Goku were the first pair of characters which were introduced in the manga and Toriyama stated that he subsequently introduced other characters in pairs because "that way, I’m able to explain the characters and their relationship to each other through their interactions. In my case, I feel that it isn’t good to insert too much narration. I suppose Goku and Bulma are representative of that." He further added that "as a child, Goku doesn’t know anything [of the world], so without Bulma, he’d be a character who didn’t say anything." The author also claimed that when the series started, his editor at the time, Kazuhiko Torishima, wanted Bulma and Goku to form a romantic relationship.