My Favorite Manga and Its Author (Pixiv Fanbox)

Akira Toriyama convinced me that a limit ain’t nothing but a thing to break. I’m forever grateful for that. Also, his style is enthralling and nowhere outside of Dragon Ball is raw power visually represented as vividly. My mother introduced me to Dragon Ball when I was 4 years old. It was exposure to such a compelling style that made me want to draw. Though through this alias, that only amounts to smut, most of my years before this were spent drawing action comics in school notebooks, heavily inspired by (or ripped off from) Dragon Ball. I often entertain the idea of eventually returning to that.

I’ve been reminding myself that one of the recurring themes of Dragon Ball is that even death can’t stop a person from becoming more powerful (e.g. SSJ3). I expect that will metaphorically be the case for Toriyama. His legacy is only going to expand from here. The plot points he pioneered have been borrowed from by so many other works that they’ve effectively spawned a subgenera, and the visual motifs he invented have spread far and wide to the point that even Captain Marvel has been retconned to be a Super Saiyan. People will look back on his work the way modern English look back on Shakespeare. Like, how people are surprised that Shakespeare invented so many common English words, people are going to be surprised by how many fantasy action tropes came from Toriyama. They’ll say, “Did you know that before Deku had the power boost that came at the cost of the integrity of his body, there was Dragon Ball’s Kaioken?” or “-before there was Super Sonic, there was Super Saiyan”, etc.

Toriyama’s contributions weren’t limited to style and storytelling either. Dragon Ball never shied away from engaging with complicated ethical matters. Goku’s insistence that Krillin spare Vegeta, believing that he could change, after Piccolo, then Goku’s sworn enemy, died to save Gohan, instilled the highest ideals of mercy. Then Frieza’s betrayal of that same mercy on doomed planet Namek and Goku’s disappointed pain at the realization that he had done all he could, confronted us with reality. You can live according to your values and some people still won’t see the light. And finally, the bitter paradox which Android 19 imparts to Gohan: because you cherish life, you must be willing to fight to protect it, even if that means killing those whom words alone cannot persuade. That moment stands together with all that came before, as a sort of bookend to an idea too complex to be explained any more straightforwardly than one could manage indirectly via shonen battle manga. Toriyama shows ethical principles for what they are – guiding stars to be sailed toward, even, if not especially when arriving at them is impossible. This is what I passively absorbed as a kid, from my exposure to Dragon Ball. It’s hard to put into words, yet Toriyama managed to express all this through cartoons about a kung-fu monkey alien man, written to be perpetually published under strict weekly deadlines.