Frieza is the galactic emperor who haunts the Dragon Ball Super manga from outside the frame: barely present for its first half, decisive in its middle, and — in a single appearance at the end of the Granolah arc — suddenly the most dangerous figure in the universe again. His newest form, Black Frieza, revealed in Chapter 87 after ten years of hidden training, knocks out Ultra Instinct Goku and Ultra Ego Vegeta in seconds, and the question of who he actually came for remains the biggest open thread in the series, tracked on the manga status page.
Frieza’s role in the manga
Frieza’s role in Super is to be the wild card nobody can price in. The gods ignore him, the heroes cannot trust him, and yet the story keeps needing him: Universe 7’s survival in the Tournament of Power genuinely depends on the tyrant who once destroyed Planet Vegeta. The manga uses him sparingly and precisely. Unlike earlier eras, where he anchored whole sagas, Super’s Frieza appears at hinge points — recruited for the tournament, whispered about by the Heeters as the true power behind the universe’s underworld, and then arriving, uninvited, at the exact moment two arcs’ worth of power scaling collapses. His restraint is what makes him frightening now: Black Frieza spares Goku and Vegeta because they were never the point.
His journey, arc by arc
Notably, the manga skips Frieza’s resurrection storyline entirely — his return from Hell and his Golden form are backstory here, referenced rather than retold. He enters the Universe Survival arc when Goku recruits him from Hell for the Tournament of Power, and the manga reveals what his time dead actually produced: through relentless mental image training, Frieza has mastered Golden Frieza’s stamina problem completely, turning his gaudy transformation into a sustainable weapon. In the tournament he is Universe 7’s cold-blooded closer — eliminating his counterpart Frost after pretending to defect, hunting wounded opponents, and finally, in chapter 42, dragging Jiren out of the arena together with Goku in a double sacrifice that leaves Android 17 to win the wish. His prize is resurrection, and he promptly rebuilds his empire.
Through the Moro arc Frieza is an absence other characters scheme around, and in the Granolah arc he becomes the story’s off-screen gravity: the Heeters’ entire plan is built on eventually overthrowing him, and Elec’s wish makes Gas the universe’s strongest specifically to that end. Then, in chapter 87, Frieza simply walks into the finale. He kills Gas, kills Elec, reveals Black Frieza, floors Goku and Vegeta with one blow apiece, announces they were never his target, and leaves. The arc ends, and the Super Hero arc that follows — set on Earth — never mentions him. He is out there, stronger than the heroes, aiming at someone or something the manga has not named.
Powers and forms
Frieza’s Super-era power story is about a lazy prodigy finally training. Golden Frieza, achieved before the manga’s present, was originally crippled by stamina drain; his Hell image training perfected it, and by the tournament he can hold the form indefinitely and fight Jiren without being instantly destroyed. Black Frieza is a different order of threat. The Granolah arc reveals that Frieza found a Room of Spirit and Time on one of his conquered worlds and spent the equivalent of ten years inside it. The result is a stark black-and-white form that one-shots the two strongest mortals in the universe at the peak of their own god forms. The manga offers no ceiling beyond that showing: no god, Angel or Destroyer has been measured against Black Frieza, and any ranking beyond “above Ultra Instinct Goku and Ultra Ego Vegeta on the day he appeared” would be invention.
Key chapters
- Chapter 87, “The Universe’s Strongest Appears” — Frieza returns, reveals Black Frieza, and leaves the heroes with a question instead of a defeat.
His tournament performance runs through the Universe Survival chapters on the chapters index, and the official English release is available through VIZ’s Shonen Jump.
Relationships that matter
With Goku, Frieza has the strangest relationship in the series: mortal enemies who have now saved each other’s universes and fought, twice, as a team against Jiren-level threats — without a gram of trust on either side. Vegeta hates him with undimmed purity, which Frieza visibly enjoys. The Heeters defined themselves against him and died for it. And somewhere beyond the page is the unnamed target of Black Frieza — a relationship the manga has promised and not yet shown.
The open question: who is Black Frieza’s target?
Frieza states plainly that he did not come to Planet Cereal for Goku and Vegeta, and the manga gives no confirmed answer about who he did come for. Fan theories name the gods, Zeno’s order, or rivals not yet introduced — all speculation. What the manga has established is only the fact of the statement, the decade of training behind it, and that Frieza is patient enough to build an army and an empire before he moves. When the series resumes, this is the thread most likely to detonate.
Manga vs anime
The differences start with what the manga omits: the Resurrection ‘F’ storyline is not retold in the manga at all, and the Broly film’s events are acknowledged only in passing, so Frieza’s manga appearances begin with the tournament. His tournament role is also colder and more efficient on the page, and of course Black Frieza — his defining Super development — is entirely manga-only, never animated, because the Granolah arc itself has never left the page.