Akira Toriyama

From Dragon Ball

Akira Toriyama born on the 5th of April, 1955 is a Japanese manga artist, most famous for his Dragon Ball series.

His first manga comic was the the story Wonder Island, published in Weekly Shonen Jump magazine in 1978, and first gained fame for his Dr. Slump, published in Shonen Jump from 1980 to 1984.

He is best known for his Dragon Ball series. Its success "forced" Toriyama to work on Dragon Ball from 1984 to 1995. During that time, he made 519 chapters, collected into 42 volumes. Each volume has an average of 200 pages, so the entire Dragon Ball storyline extends to almost 9,000 pages. The success of Dragon Ball led to three animated television series (Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and Dragon Ball GT), feature-length animated movies and video games. Unlike Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball GT was not based on Toriyama's original manga, instead being created by Toei Animation as a sequel. For this reason, some fans consider it to be non-canon, though Toriyama did oversee its production and offer insights and ideas for the series.

His works after Dragon Ball tend to be short (100-200 page) stories, including Cowa!, Kajika, and Sandland, as well as one-shots, like the spoof Neko Majin Z.