This is a heavy one, folks. We just learned legendary mangaka Akira Toriyama has passed on. In fact, it happened March 1, but his family chose not to make the announcement until a week later, March 8 (it’s Friday morning in Japan). I have a lot of thoughts right now; perhaps too many to fill this page. I don’t think there’s anyone below the age of 40 who wasn’t influenced by him in some way.
When a lot of people even THINK of manga, Toriyama’s pages are the first image to come to mind. While a lot of manga and anime tends to have a similar big-eyed, big-irised style, Toriyama’s style of drawing was uniquely his. You could spot it a mile away: the large heads, the half-shaped eyes, the blocky body types. The simple face of the Dragon Quest Slime is iconic on its own.
Toriyama landed his first published work in 1978, when Shonen Jump published Wonder Island. That’s a creation that remains obscure, but each subsequent story he gave the world was bigger than the last. In 1984 he introduced Doctor Slump, which became his first big hit, but that would soon pale in comparison to the opening chapters of something he called Dragon Ball, about a monkey-tailed kid on the hunt for the titular spheres that could summon a wish-granting dragon when gathered together. The manga and its anime adaption turned Toriyama into one of Japan’s biggest success stories.
Dragon Ball Z, the sequel series, took it even further, popularizing Toriyama around the world. Its TV adaption is often cited as the #1 (or at least #2) reason for anime’s breakthrough to US culture in the late 90s and 2000s. Millions of Western children became enthralled by the saga of Goku, Krillin, Trunks and others as they struggled to protect Earth from one threat after another, the latest visitor usually topping the previous one. It paved the way for Naruto and other anime to find success and Japanese entertainment is now a billion-dollar industry.
That would be enough on its own to cement Toriyama’s immortality, but he was ALSO hired as the official artist behind Enix’s Dragon Quest, Japan’s most popular RPG video game series of all time. Though less popular globally, the series has continued to this day and still sports Toriyama’s signature look in HD 4K. You can add to THIS his influence on Chrono Trigger, one of the most iconic and classic singular video games ever made.
What it boils down to is that Toriyama is one of the most influential cartoonists to ever live, and we’re not sure the world is going to feel the same without him. There are things he worked on that have yet to be released (Dragon Ball Daima, the next anime series, is one of them), but where do we all go from there?
