But do we know anything about its creator?

Hey, how's it going?

My name is Raf and welcome to Dragon Ball Code, the place where all we do is talk about Dragon Ball.

And today, we are going to talk about the creator of Dragon Ball, Akira Toriyama.

Akira Toriyama is a Japanese manga artist and he has drawn many different kinds of manga.

His art style is easily recognizable and he has been one of the top selling manga artists in Japan.

But let's go back to where it all began.

Akira Toriyama was born on April 5th in 1955 in Japan.

He was an artist from a young age.

Before becoming a manga artist, he worked at an advertising agency in Nagoya, designing posters for a few years.

So everything started when Akira submitted a short story for Shonen Jump after attending to one of their gatherings in 1978, which ended up getting him an honorable publishing spot in 1980 under the tile, Wonder Island.

Akira Toyama started publishing his work in 1980 with Doctor Slump and Weekly Shonen Jump.

Doctor Slump was his first big published work and he used most of the scenarios and characters from his previous one shot series Wonder Island, which he made back in 1978.

In 1983, he created two new manga, Dragon Boy and The Adventures of Tongpoo.

And these were prototypes for his following manga series, Dragon Ball.

He created Dragon Ball in 1984 after being inspired by Journey to the West.

Journey to the West is a Chinese novel about a Monkey King and his companions out on a quest to find the sacred text.

Toriyama wanted to take this basic idea and turn it into his own story, which he later named Dragon Ball.

Believe it or not, Dragon Ball started as a parody of this and it worked.

Akira published Dragon Ball in "Weekly Shonen Jump" from 1984 to 1995.

His manga became a huge hit all over Japan, and Akira was later invited to work on a video game in 1989 and this game was Chrono Trigger.

Akira's art style changed dramatically within a short period of time when he was working on this game.

His art style in Dragon Ball had a cartoony, early Shonen Jump-style with a thin outline around all of his characters.

His art change in Chrono Trigger to have thicker outline characters likely influenced by his increasing age and different taste in manga.

Later, his art style changed again with him using a more modern style with the less detailed backgrounds that he often used back in the day.

Dragon Ball was so successful that the story had to keep going. He ended up writing 519 chapters.

It also got four anime series: Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball GT and Dragon Ball Super, which is still going on today. And also Dragon Ball Heroes.

With the huge success in Japan, it spread all over the world as well.

Since then, there has been a bunch of movies, plenty of merchandise on anything you can imagine, a ton of video games and much more.

Akira Toriyama is also a major influence on many up-and-comers within the industry including Eiichiro Oda, creator of One Piece.

He has been a major influence in pop culture and he is one of the most famous artists in Japan.

His art style is easily recognizable to any fan.

Akira Toriyama created Dragon Ball as a homage to journey to the West and he changed pop culture forever.

And that is a little bit about who Toriyama is.

Thanks for watching and I'll see you later.