Toriyama, Akira 1955-

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Toriyama, Akira 1955-

PERSONAL:

Born April 5, 1955, in Aichi Prefecture, Japan; married; children: one son, one daughter. Education: Prefectural Industrial High School, graduate, c. 1976. Hobbies and other interests: Building models, playing video games, caring for pets.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Japan. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Viz Comics LLC, P.O. Box 77010, San Francisco, CA 94107.

CAREER:

Manga artist and writer, 1978—, work serialized in weekly magazine Shonen Jump. Manga series include Dr. Slump, 1980-84, Dragon Ball, 1984-95, Cowa!, 1997; Kajika, 1999; Sandland, 2000, and Neko Majin, 2001. Consultant to Japanese anime television series, including Dr. Slump, Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and Dragon Ball GT. Creator of characters for video games, including Dragon Warrior, Chrono Trigger, and Tobal No.1. Exhibitions: "Toriyama Akira no sekai," Tokyo, Japan, 1993.

WRITINGS:

World Special Akira Toriyama, Illustratio, 1994.

Dragon Ball, Volume 1, Viz Comics (San Francisco, CA), 2003.

Dragon Ball, Volume 9, Viz Comics (San Francisco, CA), 2003.

Author and artist of forty-two volumes of Dragon Ball, published in Japan.

SIDELIGHTS:

Akira Toriyama is one of Japan's best-known and most beloved manga (Japanese comics) creators. Toriyama's career has played out in the weekly comic magazine Shonen Jump, to which he began to contribute in 1978. His two most popular series for that magazine, Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball, both spawned Japanese cartoon shows, and Dragon Ball has become an international phenomenon with its spin-off television series, a feature film, and product tie-ins. "Akira Toriyama's style is one that's immediately identifiable, even among a sea of other manga artists—no one does it quite the same," a critic commented on the Storm Pages Web site. "Toriyama's male characters are shorter, rounder, and somehow tougher, with a combination of Tezuka-like saucer eyes, throbbing muscles and laughing, toothy mouths. His female characters have their own brand of solid sexiness and cross-eyed cuteness, and simply put, no one has a better grip on drawing children. Like rambunctious school kids, Toriyama characters dominate their space on paper as if it were their own sovereign state—when they shout, fly, kick, punch or let fly with a power blast, you can almost feel the energy crackle."

Toriyama began drawing as a child and persisted with it throughout his schooling in the design department of a Prefectural Industrial High School. Upon graduating he worked briefly as a mechanical designer but soon quit to try his luck drawing mangas. After winning a contest run by the publisher of Shonen Jump, he became a regular contributor to the magazine. His first series, Dr. Slump, made its debut in 1980. Dr. Slump features a bumbling inventor and his robot creation, Arale, who—although a cyborg—experiences many of the growing pains of a regular child. The series's humor appealed to adults and children alike, and a Dr. Slump television show spun off the comic. Toriyama quit drawing Dr. Slump in 1984 when he created his vastly popular Dragon Ball series, estimated to have earned more than three billion dollars through its many print, television, video, and product sales.

Toriyama's original Dragon Ball manga series was based on a Chinese tall tale, The Monkey King. The artist described the story in his Storm Pages interview as "a legend known to nearly every Asian child as the archetype of the quest story." Although he based his main character, Goku, on the Monkey King, Toriyama decided to make him a human—with a few supernatural traits thrown in to make him special. Goku's quest involves collecting seven Dragon Balls that, assembled together, would grant wishes and make dreams come true. "In the beginning, I was planning to end Dragon Ball when all seven Dragon Balls had been collected," Toriyama said. Instead, the action-filled adventure soared in popularity throughout the Far East. For eleven years, from 1984 until 1995, Toriyama not only drew the weekly series, he also conceived of all the characters and story lines—an amazing feat of creativity.

Toriyama also consulted with the creators of several television spin-offs, including Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and Dragon Ball GT. He was never tempted to stop drawing manga, however—although the anime versions of his characters did influence the way he crafted action scenes and used color. By the time he stopped drawing and writing Dragon Ball in 1995, Toriyama's work on the series ran to forty-two volumes, including 148 fights, 8,000 drawn plates, and an estimated 150 different characters. Dragon Ball collections sell briskly in the Far East and are being translated for publication in America as well.

In addition to his manga series, Toriyama has designed characters for video games. He still prefers the writing and illustrating of comics to any genre requiring animation, however. "I'm always impressed with the work of animators," he said in his Storm Pages interview. "You have to be able to draw the scenes' inbetween movements. I'm impressed with the way they can do that—I don't think I could." At the same time he appreciates the creative leeway his own style affords him as he takes real-world settings and situations and molds them into mildly and wildly surreal environments. "If you want to depict something exactly the way it is, it takes a tremendous amount of time," he said. "If you don't get the details right, the inaccuracies will accumulate somewhere. But it's no problem if it's caricatured. … My manga is in the slapstick style, so if the characters are caricatured humans, then it'd be strange for everything else not to be caricatured."