Akira Toriyama was a manga artist and character designer whose work shaped the international image of the medium more than almost any other single creator. Dr. Slump (1980–1984) and Dragon Ball (1984–1995) defined Weekly Shōnen Jump's commercial peak; his character designs for the Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger video games made him equally central to Japanese RPG visual language. He died in March 2024.
Career
Toriyama submitted his first work to Shueisha in 1978 and began serialising Dr. Slump in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1980. The series — gag comedy centred on a young female android — was an immediate hit and ran for five years. Dragon Ball followed in 1984; what began as a Journey-to-the-West parody became, after the first long arc, an extended martial-arts saga and the magazine's largest-selling property of its era.
Beyond manga, Toriyama designed characters and monsters for the Dragon Quest RPG series from its 1986 debut, and for Square's Chrono Trigger (1995). This visual work made his style, simultaneously, the default look of Japanese console RPGs.
Style
- Clean, open lines with minimal hatching, descended in part from early reading of Osamu Tezuka.
- Strong negative space — backgrounds often pared to a horizon line and a few details, allowing characters to read clearly at any reproduction size.
- Mechanical and vehicle design treated with hobbyist attention; bikes, planes, and dinosaurs share equal weight with human characters.
- Action choreography that anime adaptors (most notably Toei) could expand directly into dramatic set-pieces.
Legacy
Dragon Ball's commercial peak in the late 1980s effectively financed Weekly Shōnen Jump's expansion and gave Shueisha the resources to take risks on the works that followed. Internationally, Dragon Ball's broadcast in France, Italy, Latin America and across Asia is widely credited with creating the audience for the subsequent wave of shōnen exports.