Akira Toriyama

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Image:Akira21.jpg Akira Toriyama (鳥山明 Toriyama Akira, born on April 5, 1955 in Kiyosu, Aichi Prefecture) is a Japanese manga artist.

He debuted in 1978 with the story Wonder Island, published in Weekly Shonen Jump magazine, and gained fame for Dr. Slump, serialized weekly in Shonen Jump from 1980 to 1984.

He is probably best known for his series Dragon Ball. This work was one of the linchpins for what is known as the Golden Age of Jump. 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, so the entire Dragon Ball storyline extends to almost 9,000 pages. Moreover, the success of Dragon Ball led to an animated television series (with a later part of the story known as Dragon Ball Z), feature-length animated movies, video games, and mega-merchandising. He chose to end the Dragon Ball series so he could "take [his] next step as a manga author," as he put it.Template:Fact

His clean line and design sense led to jobs designing characters for the phenomenally popular Dragon Quest series of role-playing game (formerly called Dragon Warrior in the United States). He has also served as the character designer for the Super Famicom/SNES RPG Chrono Trigger and the popular fighting game Tobal No. 1 for the PlayStation (as well as its sequel, Tobal 2, released only in Japan), and continues to produce the occasional manga story.

His works after Dragon Ball tend to be short (100-200 page) stories, including Cowa!, Kajika, and Sand_Land, as well as one-shots, like the spoof Neko Majin Z.

He is currently the character designer for a new RPG coming out for the Xbox 360 entitled Blue Dragon.

The name of Toriyama's studio is Bird Studio, which is a play on his name, meaning "Bird Mountain".