Akira Toriyama is a widely known and acclaimed "mangaka" (Japanese word for a comic artist. Outside of Japan, manga usually refers to a Japanese comic book and mangaka refers to the author of the manga, who is usually Japanese .) known mostly for his work in the Dragon Ball metaseries .
He debuted in 1979 with the story Wonder Island, published in Weekly Shonen Jump magazine, and first gained popularity for the anime and manga series Dr. Slump, originally serialized weekly in Shonen Jump from 1980 to 1984. In 1984, Toriyama was responsible for developing Dragon Ball which was initially serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump. It became an instant accomplishment — primarily selling over 35,000,000 copies in Japan. The series was equally successful worldwide as well, including in the US and Latin America.
Toriyama is mostly acknowledged for his hit series Dragon Ball. Its success "forced" Toriyama to work on Dragon Ball from 1984 to 1995. During that eleven-year period, he produced 519 chapters, collected into 42 volumes.
Each volume has an average of 200 pages and the entire Dragon Ball storyline extends to almost 9,000 pages. Moreover, the benefit of the manga led to an animated television series; it brought forth the famed Dragon Ball Z, numerous feature-length animated movies, several video games, and mega-merchandising.
His works after Dragon Ball tend to be short (100-200 page) stories, including ' Kajika', and 'Sand Land', as well as one-shots, like the self-parody 'Neko Majin'. Most recently, he has been the character designer for 'Dragon Quest Swords' for Nintendo .
The name of Toriyama's studio is Bird Studio, which is a play on his name, meaning "Bird Mountain". 鳥 tori means "bird" and 山 yama means "mountain". 明 akira means "intelligent" or "brightness".
No comments:
Post a Comment