Akira Toriyama

鳥山 明

Japanese manga artist and designer responsible for the popular Dragonball / Dragonball Z series, and the games Dragon Quest and (with Square) Chrono Trigger. Toriyama has a very cool style for drawing characters, which initially looks simple and childish, but it quickly dawns on you that it is, in fact, utterly awesome.

Toriyama created many other mangas: dr slump, go go ackman, wonder island. He also did the character design for Tobal on playstation (from Square). Toriyama's kind of humor is simple but unique, he's probabbly the only author who takes part in the cast of his mangas.

another notable thing about toriyama is the names that he gives to his characters- a lot of them are thematic
For example, in Dr. Slump there are characters named Senbei and Arare, which are types of cookie or cracker. In dragonball you have names like Buruma (bloomers) and Trunks, which are both names of clothes, or the Saiyans Kakarotto, Vegita, Radditz which are vegetables. Piccolo is a musical instrument. Gyoza, Tenshinhan and Yamcha have to do with food etc.etc.etc. all the names are done on purpose and are jokes.

The best known mangas by Akira Toriyama are Dr. Slump and DragonBall (and DragonBall Z), which were both features in the weekly manga magazine Shonen Jump, and were both made into TV anime series in Japan.

The Dr. Slump manga series lasted during 1980 - 1985, resulting in 18 volumes.

The DragonBall manga series lasted during 1985 - 1995, resulting in 42 volumes.

An episode of DragonBall temporarily introduced characters from Dr. Slump, just for fun. Some of the ideas in DragonBall had come from Akira Toriyama's life. For example, the Karin sage's face was modeled after Toriyama's pet cat's sleeping face. Majin Buu's chubby body was an exaggeration of the author. And so on.