Akira Toriyama

Akira Toriyama (Toriyama Akira, born April 5, 1955 in Nagoya, Aichi) is a Japanese manga and game artist. He first achieved mainstream recognition for his highly successful manga Dr. Slump, before going on to create Dragon Ball—his best-known work—and acting as a character designer for several popular video games such as the Dragon Quest series, Blue Dragon, and Chrono Trigger. Toriyama is regarded as one of the artists that changed the history of manga, as his works are highly influential and popular, particularly Dragon Ball, which many manga artists cite as a source of inspiration.
He earned the 1981 Shogakukan Manga Award for best shōnen or shōjo manga with Dr. Slump, and it went on to sell over 35 million copies in Japan. It was adapted into a successful anime series, with a second anime created in 1997, 13 years after the manga ended. His next series, Dragon Ball, would become one of the most popular and successful manga in the world. Having sold more than 230 million copies worldwide, it is the third best-selling manga of all time and is considered to be one of the main reasons for the "Golden Age of Jump," the period between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s when manga circulation was at its highest. Overseas, Dragon Ball's anime adaptations have been more successful than the manga and are credited with boosting Japanese animation's popularity in the Western world.