Gag Artist Who Drew Dragon Ball
A poster designer who quit, drew some 500 rejected pages, struck gold with Dr. Slump, plotted Dragon Ball a week at a time for eleven years and gave Dragon Quest its slime.
Manga Artist & Character Designer
At 23 Akira Toriyama walked out of a poster-design job in Nagoya, borrowed money from his mother and spent a year drawing comics that his editor rejected — some 500 pages, by both men’s count. What came out the other side was a super-strong robot girl in a village of toilet jokes, a boy with a monkey’s tail, and a grinning blue slime. He plotted Dragon Ball one week at a time for eleven years under Weekly Shōnen Jump’s reader rankings, and drew it so cleanly that you can follow a fight faster than the fighters can.
Akira Toriyama was born in 1955 in Kiyosu, Aichi Prefecture, and as a boy drew the animals and vehicles he liked. The things he later named as shocks were Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy and the first television set he saw at a neighbour’s house. He went to a design-focused high school, then, against his parents’ wishes, straight to work: three years designing posters for an advertising agency in Nagoya. In his own later telling he picked up the job quickly but was often late, not being a “morning person”, was told off for dressing too casually, and grew sick of the routine. He quit at 23 and lived on money from his mother.
He found a manga contest in a magazine left in a coffee shop, missed its deadline, and sent work instead to Weekly Shōnen Jump’s monthly newcomer award. The entry was a Star Wars parody and so ineligible, but the young editor Kazuhiko Torishima liked it — later saying what caught his eye was that Toriyama wrote his sound effects in the Roman alphabet rather than katakana — and sent him a telegram telling him to keep submitting. Toriyama’s first published story, Wonder Island (1978), came last in Jump’s reader survey. So did its sequel. He kept going for about a year anyway, drawing what he reckoned was around 500 pages of failures. Torishima, helping him move house after Dr. Slump took off, found them: “In one of his closets, I stumbled upon over 500 pages of failed manuscripts that I had rejected. I was shocked by my own relentlessness.”
The breakthrough came from an instruction he resisted. Torishima told him to draw a female lead; Toriyama reluctantly produced Tomato the Cutesy Gumshoe (1979), which did well enough that he tried another. Two habits from these lean years stayed with him. Torishima observed that Toriyama made unusual use of solid black because he could not afford screentone at the start — Toriyama himself admitted he found tone “difficult to use, so I can’t.” And he drew machines the way he drew people: “if you try and draw the car’s design exactly correct, it takes a ridiculous amount of time. But if you draw it deformed, it’s alright for a few things to be off.” He built plastic models to look at mechanisms from several angles, and drew his invented vehicles “thinking about how you get into them and where the engine is located.” That is why his squat tanks and scooters look usable.
Dr. Slump ran in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1980 to 1984. A lecherous, hapless inventor, Senbei Norimaki, builds Arale, a small, bespectacled and absurdly strong robot girl, and the village around them fills with talking animals, aliens, Godzilla and Star Wars parodies, puns, sex jokes and a famous running gag about poop. It won the 1981 Shogakukan Manga Award; a Fuji TV anime began the same year, and adaptations of Toriyama’s work held that Wednesday 7 p.m. slot for eighteen years. He put real people into the strip — his assistants, his wife, his colleagues — and, most memorably, Torishima himself as the mad scientist Dr. Mashirito, villain of the series, whose catchphrase is the editor’s word: rejected.
Success was not freedom. Toriyama wanted to end Dr. Slump about six months in; Shueisha would let him finish only if he promised another serial soon after. So with Torishima he cranked out one-shots between weekly chapters. Pola & Roid won Jump’s 1981 reader’s-choice contest; Pink (1982) follows a girl who steals water to survive in a drought-stricken land — a premise he would return to in Sand Land. With Akira Sakuma he also ran Hetappi Manga Kenkyūjo in Fresh Jump (1982–1984), a comic course in which his robot stand-in, Tori-bot, teaches drawing, inking, panel framing, sound effects and how to keep a story brief and clear, and marks up amateurs’ pages for losing the reader. He married Yoshimi Katō, a Nagoya manga artist who drew as Nachi Mikami, on 2 May 1982; she sometimes helped him and his assistant, who mainly drew backgrounds, when deadlines ran short. He worked from a home studio in Kiyosu called Bird Studio — tori means bird — avoided cameras, and stood in for himself in his comics with a little robot.
Dragon Ball began with Torishima noticing that Toriyama loved Hong Kong kung-fu films, especially Jackie Chan’s, and suggesting a kung-fu comic. The result was Dragon Boy, two chapters in Fresh Jump in August and October 1983: a boy adept at martial arts escorts a princess back to her home country. In Toriyama’s account, it “got an incredibly positive response from the readers,” so he “decided to go that route” for his next serial. The Adventure of Tongpoo, a Jump one-shot at the end of 1983, added the pocketable capsules. Both are collected in Akira Toriyama’s Manga Theater, and read beside the first Dragon Ball volume they show the series being assembled from spare parts.
Dragon Ball started in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1984 as a loose remake of Journey to the West, with Goku as the monkey king Sun Wukong and Bulma in the pilgrim monk’s role. Toriyama said he chose the classic because “all I would have to do would be to arrange things,” and that he dropped his first idea — making Goku an actual monkey — as not “very innovative,” turning him into “an ordinary boy” with a tail. The early chapters are a gag adventure: wish-granting balls, a pint-sized villain, and the leering old Turtle Hermit swapping favours for a look at Bulma’s underwear, the same bawdy register as Dr. Slump.
It was not working. “Up until the Tenka’ichi Budōkai began, the series hadn’t been all that popular,” Toriyama said in 1995. Torishima told him why: “Your protagonist is rather plain. That’s why it’s not popular.” Toriyama had made Goku’s clothes deliberately plain, and his answer was not to dress him up but to change the machine: “So I’d simply make the story into a tournament format.” He “temporarily withdrew the other characters besides Goku, brought back Kame-Sen’nin, and added Kuririn” — Goku trains under the Turtle Hermit beside a new rival — and the story moves to a martial-arts tournament — a structure that gives a weekly reader a bracket, a scoreboard and a reason to come back. Toriyama was plotting almost blind: “I basically only thought of what I was doing for that week… Even I didn’t know what was going to happen the next week.”
Dragon Ball outlived three editors. Torishima stayed until the end of the 23rd Tenka’ichi Budōkai; Yū Kondō took the Saiyan arc through Cell’s perfect form; Fuyuto Takeda saw it to the end. In round-tables printed in the series’ Shenlong Times booklets in 1995, Torishima said “You can tell who was editor at the time by the enemy characters,” and Kondō described his era’s logic bluntly: “In a story manga the fights have to escalate, that’s all it was.” Escalation is what produced Saiyans from space, Freeza, the androids and Cell, and it is what readers rewarded. Takeda later recalled that at their first meeting Toriyama told him “I want to end Dragon Ball,” while the series was “#1 in the rankings by a longshot” in Jump. It ran 519 chapters until 1995, by which point Jump’s circulation had hit a record of about 6.5 million; Toriyama said at the end that he had asked everyone involved to let him stop so he could “take some new steps in life.”
How a Dragon Ball page reads is the real achievement. Toriyama admitted that at first he “didn’t really have much confidence in my battle scenes” and had never drawn “what you might call motion pictures”; as the battles became intense he “gradually came to switch to more simple lines.” He took the timing of his impacts from Jackie Chan films: “It’s not just a ‘bang’, but like a flash of light followed by a ‘BOOOM!’” Torishima called him a master of convenience, “sloppy, but in a good way”: blasted landscapes and Super Saiyan blond hair both meant less to draw and ink. The result, in critic Jason Thompson’s phrase, is “an action manga drawn by a gag manga artist”, with action scenes “almost like animation storyboards on paper”. In the first tournament, Thompson notes, one clash is drawn as a burst of speed no spectator can see, then replayed in slow motion. Small, round, legible bodies; empty backgrounds; speed lines that tell you the direction before the hit lands. Toei’s anime, running from 1986, carried that grammar to television.
Torishima also pulled him into Dragon Quest (1986), to make Enix’s role-playing game look unlike its rivals; Toriyama admitted he joined without knowing what an RPG was, and that it made a brutal schedule worse. The division of labour stayed the same for the rest of his life: the series creator Yuji Horii sends rough sketches with each character’s background, Toriyama redraws them, Horii approves. Koichi Sugiyama wrote the music. Toriyama explained in 1995 that because sprites were so small, a design needed only one distinguishing feature to be recognisable, which freed him to make it more complex than he could afford to draw week after week in a manga. The slime — a droplet with a grin — became the series’ mascot. In 2016 he said that the fixed period and setting made every new Dragon Quest harder to design than the last; he worked on every installment until his death.
Chrono Trigger (Square, March 1995) was sold on a “Dream Team”: Hironobu Sakaguchi of Final Fantasy, Horii and Toriyama. Credit it precisely. Sakaguchi and Horii supervised; Takashi Tokita, Yoshinori Kitase and Akihiko Matsui directed; Kazuhiko Aoki produced; Masato Kato wrote most of the story; Yasunori Mitsuda scored it with Nobuo Uematsu and Noriko Matsueda. Toriyama designed the characters, monsters, vehicles and the look of each era, and Square’s artists studied his drawings to translate them into sprites; the squire-turned-frog Frog began as one of his sketches. He went on to design the fighters for the PlayStation’s Tobal No. 1 (1996) and Tobal 2 (1997).
After Dragon Ball he went back to the length he had always preferred. Cowa! (1997–1998) is a monster-village adventure; Kajika (1998) is a single-volume quest; Sand Land (2000) sends a demon prince, an old sheriff and a tank across a desert ruled by a king who controls the water — the drought and water theft of Pink, eighteen years on, with a sharper line on who profits from scarcity. Jaco the Galactic Patrolman (2013), written for Jump’s 45th anniversary, was the last manga he both wrote and drew; by his own account he fell four months behind on it while working on about two hours’ sleep a night, and its eleventh chapter reveals it is set just before Dragon Ball. From 2015 he supplied the story of Dragon Ball Super, drawn by his successor Toyotarou, and Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero (2022) was his last complete work for the franchise; for the 2024 Sand Land anime he wrote a new story arc.
He died on 1 March 2024, aged 68, of an acute subdural haematoma. Bird Studio announced it a week later, after a private family funeral, saying he “still has several works in the middle of creation with great enthusiasm.” Fans in Mexico City raised their arms in a mass Spirit Bomb; Horii, Eiichiro Oda and Yoshihiro Togashi were among the colleagues who paid tribute. In 2013 he had put his ambitions plainly: “The role of my manga is to be a work of entertainment through and through. I dare say I don’t care even if [my works] have left nothing behind, as long as they have entertained their readers.” Read Dragon Boy, then Dragon Ball to the first tournament, then Sand Land: you will see a man who hated wasting a line, learning where to put the few he kept.
