Akira Toriyama

Akira Toriyama launched Dragon Ball in Weekly Shonen Jump at the end of 1984, following a pair of short prototypes called Dragon Boy and The Adventures of Tongpoo. What began as a lighthearted martial arts adventure starring a tailed boy named Goku, a teenage Bulma, and a flying magic staff grew over eleven years into 519 chapters and 42 tankobon volumes, roughly nine thousand pages of story that carried readers from the 21st World Tournament all the way through the Majin Buu arc.

Toriyama drew the whole thing with just two assistants across his career, Hisashi Tanaka and Takashi Matsuyama, working out of his own Bird Studio. His editors Kazuhiko Torishima, Yu Kondo, and Fuyuto Takeda pushed him through the grueling weekly schedule, and the manga became one of the central pillars of what fans call the Golden Age of Jump. Every character, creature, vehicle, and environment in that original run came from his pen.

Toriyama's art is immediately recognizable for its clean outlines, confident anatomy, and an almost mechanical precision in hardware design. He was a devoted scale model hobbyist, which spilled into the tanks, pods, capsule houses, and spaceships that fill Dragon Ball. He openly credited Osamu Tezuka, Walt Disney, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Godzilla, Ultraman, and Jackie Chan's Drunken Master as early influences, and his love of Westerns and science fiction shows in the genre hopping tone of his work.

Outside of Dragon Ball he was also the character designer for the Dragon Quest role playing series starting in 1986, and for Square's Chrono Trigger in 1994, two projects that gave his art a second life among video game fans. His earlier breakout, Dr. Slump, ran from 1980 to 1984 and proved his gift for goofy, affectionate comedy long before Goku ever powered up. Shy, private, and famously allergic to drawing vehicles even though he excelled at them, he preferred rural life, his family, his dogs, and his models to the Tokyo manga spotlight.

Akira Toriyama died on March 1, 2024, at the age of 68, from an acute subdural hematoma. His former assistant Takashi Matsuyama later revealed that Toriyama had been dealing with a brain tumor and had undergone surgery shortly before his death. The news landed like a meteor across the global anime community, and tributes poured in from manga artists, game studios, and world leaders, a reminder of how deeply his work had reached outside Japan.

His legacy is almost impossible to overstate. Dragon Ball shaped the DNA of modern shonen, from One Piece to Naruto to My Hero Academia, and the Goku silhouette became shorthand for anime itself. Even in his final years he stayed close to the franchise, supervising Dragon Ball Super, designing new forms, and passing the manga torch to his handpicked successor Toyotarou. Dragon Ball keeps running, but every page still carries his fingerprints.