Dragon Ball Creator Akira Toriyama Dies at 68

[Fireminer]

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2 ... 68/.208430

RIP. Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z were probably the second and third manga series that I read on entirety.

[Captain_EO]

He did wonders in helping anime spread across the world, with not only Dragon Ball, but also his character design work in the video game industry.
Mr. Toriyama was always private when it came to his personal life... May he rest in peace.
I wonder if we will see any attempts to released his unfinished works, similar to what happened with Satoshi Kon and Miura?

[DKop]

I kinda wrote up my thoughts hearing the news just over an hour ago, this really just sums up my my emotions and thoughts right now:

With waking up to the news on Toriyama’s death this morning, there’s a whole lot I wanna say. I firstly believe first and foremost that I wouldn’t be an anime fan if I never saw Dragonball Z on Toonami back in the spring of 1999. I believe I'm in that same boat with millions of other western anime fans who say “yes, DBZ was my first anime, and it led me to being an anime fan whether I knew it or not.”

For a legacy that Toriyama has left behind can only be described as “overwhelming.” Who would’ve thought that a manga created from someone who did gag comics before I was born would be on the same scale of legacy like Osama Tezuka and Leiji Matsumoto. I’d argue that Toriyama’s works of influence seemed to have gone beyond the former two. Dragonball Z was known in the west by anime fans who saw it through tape trading, raw VHS/LD’s bought from anime stores and conventions, then hit television with its biggest audience on Cartoon Network.

I remember being in the lunchroom in 6th grade at Apex Middle School that spring of 1999 and my nerdy friends sitting down at the table talking about this “hot new show” on Cartoon Network after school. Once I saw what that was “Dragonball Z” a couple of months before the end of my 6th grade year, it not only changed my life but I saw the impact it had around me. It went to action figures hitting the local Gamestop and Suncoast video then later major retail stores, to Burger King having toys made that summer of 1999, and slowly made its way to every corner of the world in the next 20 years. Anyways people could get their hands on anything Dragonball Z named, we had to have it.

I remember seeing the Super Famicom games at the long defunct sketchy game store Buy-Rite Video Games in North Raleigh when I had a chance to check it out for the first time that same year in 1999, and people wanted whatever they could of Dragonball Z. This led to the localization of games coming out for the major video game systems at the time and hasn’t stopped since. VHS tapes that had 2 or 3 episodes for $30 bucks a pop are now coming out in collections for a whole season for the same cost on DVD and Blu Ray. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of just merchandise for this series.

Culturally, I can’t think of a series that is watched by thousands upon thousands in one gathering place in South American countries to see the final fight of Goku taking on Jiren and people setting aside their differences for a moment to see cartoon characters fight on a jumbotron. People (really non-Anime fans) seeing this happen would get some to scratch their heads and wonder why? Why are people so obsessed over a show from Japan to be on this scale of a watch party? I believe it’s because there’s an element involved in the human heart that brings the masses together in one sitting. It's because people love Dragonball Z to the point they’ll see it in public with other fans and to them that’s the biggest life event in their lives. I’d call that quite magical. There’s no real logic behind it, other than a common love for a show and the community behind it.

Toriyama's death cannot and won't be dismissed as a small “oh that sucks, I really enjoyed his work” remembrance. The man, more than likely, undoubtedly created a pop culture phenomenon that will cement his legacy on this planet. I’m not sure how long he will be remembered for, but for those who take his death to heart, he won’t be forgotten any time soon. There is still so much I could go into on Toriyama and Dragonball Z, but I'll leave that to the real writing professionals on major websites for that job. This is my personal send off to the legacy of Toriyama, and he will be greatly missed by one of millions of anime fans today, that would be me. Just wanted to say thank you for all you have done!

[llj]

Too young, man. I don't really have much else to add. While I was never a big DBZ fan to the degree many modern and millennial anime fans are, his art was all over video games, ads, posters. One of the most recognizable art styles anywhere.

[Drew_Sutton]

This one hurt a bit. I think partially because of his age but also what Dragonball meant to me as a young anime fan. It wasn't my first anime, or even my first anime that I started deep-diving into or what got me into fansubs. But it was what I was watching that was a confluence of all of that: it went from (what felt like) underground and back of the magazines to Saban and FUNimation's first dubs in the mid 1990s and the cries of fanboys of censorship in the now halcyon Web 1.0 days led me to trying to find more fansubs of it. It was watching those fansubs that I once said to myself, "If I learned Japanese myself, so much more of the anime world would open up to me..." It was shonen flare at it's finest to capture my teen attention. Reading about the differences of its Japanese broadcast - and letting my imagination run wild - made me only want more. It is possible that almost any other anime could have been in Dragonall's place at that time for me but it was a properly massive show with almost 450 TV episodes and over 15 movies, there was tons that I could only hope to get my hands on. And that's not even counting GT that was airing at the time. I eventually moved on from Dragonball, always being a thing I liked before and spent a lot of time on, but the mindset of how I approached anime - being properly exposed to fansubs, being involved in Web 1.0 fansom, digging deep into series if there were differing US and JP releases - was now how I approached every anime. I also witnesed Dragonball go through this vicious fandom cycle where it was everywhere, then it was loathed, and eventually became beloved again. I'd seen it with AKIRA and Fist of the North Star before by the time Dragonball came back around.

But Toriyama was more than Dragonball. Dr. Slump is about as rich in scope as Dragonball is. And it's wildly different, being primarily a gag manga. I never dug into Dr. Slump remotely close to what I did Dragonball. He has a lot of one-shots and short stories, too, which I am unfamiliar with. The last manga of his I read, Sand Land, I liked the world he was building around it but I only got a few chapters into it. I probably should just break down and buy it in English, or as much of it is available. As a prolific illustrator, Toriyama gets a lot of praise for his work through the Dragon Quest franchise and Chrono Trigger (shamelessly, even not as much of a gamer, CT is my favorite game of all time) but he's also part of an illustrious class of mecha designers that you never think of as mecha designers. He's done a variety of robots, giant and smaller, but his love of cars and trucks and things that go translates to both realistic depictions of modes of transport along with his well known characters as well as his own unique designs of transport for the worlds of his own creation.