Akira Toriyama was born in 1955 in Kiyosu, a small city in Aichi Prefecture. He worked briefly as a graphic designer for an advertising agency before submitting his manga work to competitions, winning a prize from Shueisha in the late 1970s that launched his professional career. His debut series, Wonder Island, was published in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1978. His major breakthrough came with Dr. Slump, beginning in 1980, a comedy series featuring the robot girl Arale Norimaki and her creator living in a small village called Penguin Village. Dr. Slump was enormously successful in Japan — adapted into a long-running anime, generating merchandise — and established Toriyama as a master of comedy manga and character design.
Dragon Ball, which began in Weekly Shōnen Jump in November 1984, was initially conceived as an action-adventure comedy loosely based on the Chinese classic Journey to the West, following a boy named Son Goku — who has a monkey's tail and extraordinary physical strength — as he searches for seven magical dragon balls that can summon a wish-granting dragon. The early volumes balance comedy and adventure in much the way Dr. Slump had done, but as the series developed through its middle period — the tournament arcs, the arrival of Vegeta and the Saiyans, the battles on Namek — the comedy receded and the action expanded into something that would reshape the global understanding of what action manga could be.
Dragon Ball Z, the portion of the series that introduced the most iconic elements — Super Saiyan transformations, the power-level system, the enormous battles that destroy landscapes and take multiple episodes to conclude — became the template for shonen action manga in ways that are still visible in contemporary series. The vocabulary Toriyama invented — training to break through your limits, power that surges visually, battles between characters whose relationship to each other is as important as their fighting ability — is the vocabulary of shonen action manga. His character designs, which communicate personality and power with extraordinary economy, have been foundational for visual storytelling in anime and manga for forty years.
His parallel career as character designer for the Dragon Quest video game series, beginning with the first game in 1986, made him one of the most significant figures in the history of Japanese gaming as well as manga. Dragon Quest's monsters and heroes — the Slime, the most recognizable enemy in RPG history — bear his unmistakable stamp. Toriyama passed away in March 2024 at the age of sixty-eight. The tributes that followed, from creators, players, and readers across the world, reflected an influence so pervasive it had become invisible: the air of contemporary popular culture, in which it was simply assumed.
