A sad loss for the comics, games and anime world, the creator of Dragon Ball, Dr. Slump, Sand Land and character designer of the Chrono Trigger, Dragon Quest and Blue Dragon games passed away March 1st and it was just announced.

Dragon Ball Z was the first actual genuine manga I ever read, I bought a plastic bag of the comics from the Rite Aid that was on the corner of my street and even though it was 3 comics smack in the middle of a story arc I'd seen the anime already on Toonami and just enjoyed seeing Toriyama's art in its comic glory. The personality he conveyed in his expressions and action just hits different than the often cost-saving methods the anime employed. The comics of course were better paced, comics ARE the superior medium after all.
Like, there's no denying I was influenced in some way by DBZ, especially when it comes to drawing hair. Many of my favorite artists wear their appreciation for his work on their sleeve too. I never got to play any of the games he designed for– but a friend of mine had a guide book loaded with his art, and I had a great time looking through it when I hung out there. I've got a little Free Comic Book Day sample of his cute monster comic, Cowa! that I keep in a drawer. It'll make me a little sad when I open that drawer next :(

It also makes me so sad because he really wanted to move on to other works but was saddled to DBZ as the money-cow. The Sand Lands game is just coming out, breaks my heart he won't be there to see how it does.

Regardless if you're a fan, everybody knows OF DBZ especially as a lot of tropes of other fighting manga/anime and even western animation owe a lot to Toriyama's creation and at least have seen Goku, he's about as recognizable as Mickey Mouse at this point.

I can't be the only fan here feeling sad for the loss and about this bad news, he was only 68– that just doesn't feel old enough to have lost him it just feels too soon.


Respectfully, if anyone is gonna come to complain about his work or let me know they didn't personally like it, PLEASE move along. I know some of you believe your all-important opinions MUST be heard but have some consideration, this ain't the time.

Fuck!!!

Rest in peace, you absolute freaking LEGEND. Loved DBZ, loved Chrono Trigger, loved Dragon Quest. I eventually need to get around to checking out some of his other works like Dr. Slump, but I have yet to read or play anything he's had his hand in that I didn't like.

Just last year I even picked up an “origins” book with a large chunk of his earlier comics. He had a playful spirit right from the start, and brought that spirit into every one of his works. We'll miss you, Toriyama.

@Lothar, well said man, sums up my feelings on it as well.

@Happopo, yes “Legend” is exactly the word to describe the man, it's making me emotional reading some of the other mangaka speaking of his influence and friendship. Oda (One Piece) had a particularly touching writeup on twitter.

By all accounts he was a talented, kind man who just worked hard every day and didn't let fame go to his head. Like, he was a genuine talent, the way he drew robots/machines, dinosaurs and dragons, his landscapes, the outfits he designed for characters to wear, all just fantastic stuff and visually interesting. There's a lot of thought and care he put into his worlds that gets glossed over by the casual DBZ knower as “scream and power up beefy men” cartoon series,(and it only got that way because manga time and animation time flows different) which has been a huge part of so many people's formative years in art.

You're so right about his playful spirit too, it just really shines out in his solo pieces too. There's just so much joy and sense of adventure in them.

DBZ was the gateway for many normies into anime / manga. One of the titans of the industry with a unmistakable style.

^ for real, tho a lot of us got into anime by way of Sailor Moon and then Pokemon, so seeing DBZ for the first time was like seeing something “grown up” because it had violence and death and even some sex jokes, too. In spite of weird Puritan American censorship like changing “Hell” to “HFIL” that is.
It was so cool though, and yeah it kind of became the “acceptable” anime to be a fan of without getting picked on for being a weeb, probably because it projected such raw masculinity XD

It honestly hurts as he was a hero of mine, I even manage to find a pdf of his “even monkeys can draw manga”, and I consider it the essentials along with Scott McCloud's understanding comics to making comics.

Honestly I feeling very torn up over his death but got no real outlets outside of the internet, the only person I have is mom and she's one of those people who really doesn't understand how this affects my generation.

I hate saying that, but it is kind of true.

I don't know what else to say except this is very upsetting.

^ it IS upsetting man, and I'm truly sorry you have no outlet to vent except DD, because it really feels like a lot of folks here are like your mom– a little out of the age bracket that really *gets* the cultural impact DBZ had, or have that weird snotty attitude that things that are popular are inherently bad or without merit because they can't be bothered to take the time to understand the appeal. No, just assume things get popular for no reason that can be quantified at all! I'm glad that the crowd that doesn't have anything nice to say is respectfully sitting this one out, but I am a little disappointed at the same time there's only a handful of people even wanting to discuss such an icon and comic legend on a comics site. Even on the main page! :(

I think a lot of Gen X+ really still thinks of anime as Speed Racer, because that's what they remember forming a core memory of. Even when they try to parody DBZ they're still talking out of synch and really fast.

Hey, was anyone here a fan of TeamFourStar's DBZ Abridged? I feel like DBZ Super: Super Hero must've taken some influence from them, there were a few very self-aware jokes in there.

Unrelated but I always loved the Alien-esque design of this Pirate Robot


I think it's adorable

Amelius wrote:
I think a lot of Gen X+ really still thinks of anime as Speed Racer, because that's what they remember forming a core memory of. Even when they try to parody DBZ they're still talking out of synch and really fast.

Hey, was anyone here a fan of TeamFourStar's DBZ Abridged? I feel like DBZ Super: Super Hero must've taken some influence from them, there were a few very self-aware jokes in there.

Eegh… that reminds me of the Futurama episode where they tried to do an anime-style short - emphasis on “tried to”. I was hoping it would be a decent parody since anime was fairly popular by that point, but the results were… pretty much what you described. Speed Racer/Voltron with all the expected clichés.

It IS weird to think that DBZ isn't as popular as it once was, though, because as far as I know it's basically what made anime mainstream in America even before Pokemon came along. It was everywhere. Pretty much all of my friends, whenever they made any attempts at drawing, would wholesale lift Toriyama's style, and they were even talking about doing cosplay as Saiyans. I'd say it even had a live action adaptation here in the States, if something like that ever actually happened, which it totally, 100% did not.

And RIP Krillin Owned Count XD. Still one of the most underrated DBZ characters IMO.

It is tragic that we live in the time where the great creators we grew up with are reaching their senior years and passing away. Leiji Matsumoto passed away this time last year. Al Jaffe also passed last April so it'll be a year next month. We're all affected as such icons pass away. Go Nagai is 78. Hayao Miyazaki is 83.
Sixty-eight is comparatively young considering my older sister is 69 and my wife is 63. I'm looking at it in the mirror everyday. But all things pass away. Toriyama is so fortunate to left such a rich legacy. We all do him honor by enjoying it.

I'm just warning you all now when Rumiko Takahashi passes I have nothing left so I'm just going to push this big red button that probably does something awful.

paneltastic wrote:
I'm just warning you all now when Rumiko Takahashi passes I have nothing left so I'm just going to push this big red button that probably does something awful.

Her name crossed my mind as well… I remember reading about her work schedule even today where she gives herself VERY little rest so she can keep up with the younger mangaka. As much as I can appreciate her working spirit, respectfully I do wish she'd slow down a bit for the sake of her own health…

bravo1102 wrote:
It is tragic that we live in the time where the great creators we grew up with are reaching their senior years and passing away. Leiji Matsumoto passed away this time last year. Al Jaffe also passed last April so it'll be a year next month. We're all affected as such icons pass away. Go Nagai is 78. Hayao Miyazaki is 83.
Sixty-eight is comparatively young considering my older sister is 69 and my wife is 63. I'm looking at it in the mirror everyday. But all things pass away. Toriyama is so fortunate to left such a rich legacy. We all do him honor by enjoying it.

Yeahp and it's weird to see how some people age so differently, I've got time blindness and haven't changed all that much but I see some folks who look like they aged 20 years in the span of 5 and wonder what the heck must be goin' on? Oof, and I was pretty sad about Al Jaffe, at my grandparent's cottage there was a box of old magazines and comics from the 60's-70's my aunts and uncles kept, old MAD magazines and a collection of Al's “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions”.

Aw no I didn't know about Leiji! I haven't gotten deep into his work, but Harlock is a great design. The og anime's animation quality tho LOL What I best knew him for is his collab with Daft Punk to make the musical "Interstella 5555"

Hapoppo wrote:

paneltastic wrote:
I'm just warning you all now when Rumiko Takahashi passes I have nothing left so I'm just going to push this big red button that probably does something awful.

Her name crossed my mind as well… I remember reading about her work schedule even today where she gives herself VERY little rest so she can keep up with the younger mangaka. As much as I can appreciate her working spirit, respectfully I do wish she'd slow down a bit for the sake of her own health…

Noooo don't saaaay that! She's only 66 tho and on average women tend to live a bit longer than men (which kinda sucks ngl) but I also hope she's taking care of her health. Manga is tough work, these artists put their bodies through so much because it's so demanding. Sure they've often got teams but the main artist is always going to be doing the bulk of the initial work, they're the ones that trained themselves to draw their character consistently after all.

I have a relic of the past– a friend loaned me her bootleg VHS rip of Ranma 1/2 and I forgot to return it, I feel awful about that but it's also no longer the 90's and that's easy to get ahold of without a bunch of guilt trips in between about how you wouldn't dare make a copy of this, would you?
I was afraid to watch it at my home though because there was boobies once and I didn't want to get in trouble LOL I watched horror movies with my parents and yet this made me worried, that's funny.

Though back to Toriyama, here's another example of what I admired about his art (got this one off tumblr)


Not only were the androids just cool characters, I love these vehicles so much. I could just stare at these absorbing all the details and how this doesn't just look cool, it looks believable and functional. I feel like his hatching is also a recognizable trait that I see in his work, yes there's tones added on this but he really did great showing the shape of things with just a little crosshatch here and there. That has an almost 3d quality to it, when today people would just simply make a 3d model and convert it to 2d. I often see a lot of his standalone art is his characters travelling somewhere, on all sorts of interesting vehicles. My favorite are when it involves a dinosaur. :)

So cute!

Amelius wrote:
I think a lot of Gen X+ really still thinks of anime as Speed Racer, because that's what they remember forming a core memory of. Even when they try to parody DBZ they're still talking out of synch and really fast.

Gen Xer here. My first anime intro was Battle of the planets, then Strablazers, Voltron, Astroboy, Kimba, and Robotech.
Later I got to see the retro goodness of Mya the Bee and Speed Racer…
And later on the movies, Akira, Naussica, Porco Rosso, Ghost in the Shell…

Never got to see DBZ till MUCH later, in the early 2000s on Toonami. And I didn't get it, it felt like I was missing a huge amount… It wasn't till the DragonBall anime came on that I actually got it and it all made sense to me. I LOVED that, everything about it. Love for the guy was totally warranted after seeing that.

Cartoon Network should NEVER have started with DBZ! The original Dragon Ball is fantastic.

Ozoneocean wrote:

Amelius wrote:
I think a lot of Gen X+ really still thinks of anime as Speed Racer, because that's what they remember forming a core memory of. Even when they try to parody DBZ they're still talking out of synch and really fast.

Gen Xer here. My first anime intro was Battle of the planets, then Strablazers, Voltron, Astroboy, Kimba, and Robotech.
Later I got to see the retro goodness of Mya the Bee and Speed Racer…
And later on the movies, Akira, Naussica, Porco Rosso, Ghost in the Shell…

Never got to see DBZ till MUCH later, in the early 2000s on Toonami. And I didn't get it, it felt like I was missing a huge amount… It wasn't till the DragonBall anime came on that I actually got it and it all made sense to me. I LOVED that, everything about it. Love for the guy was totally warranted after seeing that.

Cartoon Network should NEVER have started with DBZ! The original Dragon Ball is fantastic.

Haha appreciate the Gen-X perspective! That's the generation my parents are from and my mom says she loved Speed Racer, my husband's parents are a little more toward Boomer age and so his father speaks fondly of Astroboy, Tobor The 8th Man and so on. Man, I just saw Akira for the first time just last year! Incredible, they really went the extra mile on that animation. I almost want to make a separate thread about animation here XD

Yeah, I have massive fondness for DBZ but I love Dragon Ball even more, even if it's Vegeta-less. It was more close to its “Journey to the West” story roots, and leaned more toward fantasy than sci-fi. No disrespect to sci fi I just like fantasy a tiny bit more!

Amelius wrote:
I am a little disappointed at the same time there's only a handful of people even wanting to discuss such an icon and comic legend on a comics site. Even on the main page! :(

I am surprised his “how to” guides aren't brought up a lot more because they help out so much, or his non-DB work is just so cute and silliness like Cowa or Dr. Slump.

I honestly should take time to collect more of his work when I get a chance.

Also somebody brought up Rumiko, I say check out Mermaid Scar, it is.. You will never look at a mermaid the same again.

On the subject of having an outlet for grief over heroes dying, I didn't know Al Jaffe had passed, that hurts because I grew up on his work in Mad Magazine. I don't know, I feel like a ton of weight that never left me when George Romero passed, and when Stan Lee died I was about ready to fall apart because I grew up watching him in things like “how to draw the Marvel way” and the last thing I heard him talking was saying the best word to say was “fuck”.

I couldn't share any of this with my mom, because she not only is out of that generation of influence but still within that generation of stiff, upper lip seriousness that - and I love my mother but I have to say this - had that remains of Victorian era bullshit lingering around about being proper men and ladies, hell the other day she went on a rant about women wearing jeans instead of skirts and being more feminine. And while she doesn't openly look down upon my work, hobbies and lifestyle I get that sense of her “worrying” about me when she dies in that I am too stupid to take care of myself way.

Sorry to get very trauma dumpy there, again this death is hitting me a bit than I like to admit.

As another gen-Xer here (born 1976), I think there is this distinction: when I was a kid, there was a huge invasion of anime on italian TV, that went on for a while.

Then when I was in high school, there was the boom of “mangas” wor weebs (initially italian publishers translated from american Viz comics translations of mangas, but at some point they started to translate directly from japanese and I think the italian translation of Dragonball was the first western translation of Dragonball, and the first manga that was translated without inverting left to right, because Toriyama insisted on it).

Dragonball had already been aired on local TVs (only the part when Goku was still a kid though), but then the translation of the manga was a huge success, the translation of the manga of Ranma was also a huge success, and this ultimately pushed bigger TV channel to translate and publish the anime of those.

So I think that speaking of late gen-Xers, one should differentiate between most gen-X ers and the subgroup of gen-Xers who were the original weebs, among which stuff like Dragonball was very popular but in a weeby way (like I watched many non-translated OVAs of Dragonball trying to divine what the characters were saying).

marcorossi wrote:
As another gen-Xer here (born 1976), I think there is this distinction: when I was a kid, there was a huge invasion of anime on italian TV, that went on for a while.

Then when I was in high school, there was the boom of “mangas” wor weebs (initially italian publishers translated from american Viz comics translations of mangas, but at some point they started to translate directly from japanese and I think the italian translation of Dragonball was the first western translation of Dragonball, and the first manga that was translated without inverting left to right, because Toriyama insisted on it).

Dragonball had already been aired on local TVs (only the part when Goku was still a kid though), but then the translation of the manga was a huge success, the translation of the manga of Ranma was also a huge success, and this ultimately pushed bigger TV channel to translate and publish the anime of those.

So I think that speaking of late gen-Xers, one should differentiate between most gen-X ers and the subgroup of gen-Xers who were the original weebs, among which stuff like Dragonball was very popular but in a weeby way (like I watched many non-translated OVAs of Dragonball trying to divine what the characters were saying).

I am always fascinated by the original outside of Japan otaku culture, because it just so, unexplainable of a rabbit hole that many people ignore. Like furry culture, people try to say it started 15 years ago (it didn't), or point out how it is a modern thing (from all of the deities and items throughout history that's seems like a big myth, no pun intended, it is just more acknowledged in the modern day like a lot of other things). Back on topic I hear some really stupid things like anime was created by Toonami, or it wasn't popular until late 1990's.
I don't know much about the European front, and would like to hear more stories about how it was later on.

The NYC store Forbidden Planet basement circa 1978. The Japanese penpal video sharing culture of the 1980s. This was before it was even commonly called anime. Otaku hadn't been coined yet, but hentai is eternal. Always meant pervert.
Got my first hentai in the 1990s but I remember watching The Overfiend in 1988 when it was brand new. Had no clue what I was watching but only knew it was messed up and really couldn't follow the translated script.
It's sad that a lot of current fans seem to have forgotten all about anything pre-2000 let alone the incredible 1970s series. I saw the original 1970s Cutey Honey a few years ago and it was meta and self aware in ways other animes wouldn't be for decades.
But now I'm trapped seeing whats on Free Vee and Amazon Prime.

You realize I still remember when it was called “Jap Crap” and you had to be careful who you talked about it around because there were a lot more people with personal memories of the Great Pacific War. My brother and I had to seclude ourselves away from our grandmother who to her dying day never forgave those “yellow bastards” for murdering her brother on Iwo Jima.
Understand Japanimation ?(as some called it then) You were lucky if someone didn't call you a “Jap lover” and disrespectful toward all the Americans who fought and defeated Imperial Japan. I always had my great uncle Vladimir's sacrifice to defend myself against that. (I use “Jap” because no one of that generation called them Japanese. It was either “nip” or “Jap” racist as all hell.
That's something else a lot of current fans have no experience of.
My sister's best friend in High school was half Japanese. She wasn't allowed in the house. Different world. You can still find it in places and I knew someone who watched Grave of the Fireflies who cheered on the B-29s dropping the fire bombs.

Furwerk studio wrote:
I don't know much about the European front, and would like to hear more stories about how it was later on.

In Italy, starting from the late 70s, in part because a change in the law that made possible to have small private TV broadcasters (that I'll not get into), there was a veritable invasion of japanese anime.
Generally these products were treated as low quality, but these newborn small private TV stations could buy this stuff on the cheap and compete with the bigger government TV emitters (which for various cultural reasons did buy much less of them).
When I was a kid I remember all the adults considered japanese series of low value, in part because their concept of “high value” was based on Disney movies that were (A) much higer budget movies and (B) fundamentally “educative”, whereas japanese animation was much freer from this point of view.

However many kids from my generation consumed a lot, really a lot of anime (like multiple hours a day).

When my generation grew up, some fans started producing, first as pirate fanzines and later commercially, translations of japanese comics, many of them of series that were aired and were hugely popular (like Fist of the North Star or Urusey Yatsura).
Since some of these charachters were already well known these publications had very good sales, and this kickstarted the anime/manga boom, although “very good sales” is a relative term and when I was in high school/university it was still a niche hobby, and I suspect many of my classmates tought I was a bit off for being a huge fan of it.

At the beginning, those publicatins were translated from english because these publishers were very small, so mostly they translated from american translations of Viz comics, but in a few years since there was a boom they hired japanese translators and started translating directly from japanese.

Also at the time translations were very different because stuff like “kun” or “chan” weren't known, so translations were more heavily localized, ramen was translated as spaghetti etc.; furthermore since people didn't know to read right to left, all pages were ususally reversed, as in a mirror.

At some point a publisher im Italy wanted to translate the “dragonball” comic and, since Toriyama was strongly against this “mirror” thing, they took the risk to publish right to left, and it was a huge success.
People also became more understanding of Japanese culture so translation became less localized/distorted (at times, in my opinion, too literal).

Dragonball was the first non-mirrored manga in Italy, but the publisher made a huge things out of it and at the time they said that it was the first non-mirrored translation in the west, maybe it is true.

Also a big difference was that at the time usually you already saw the anime serie on TV and only later there was the manga, with a generally better adaptation and less cuts.

I was very surpised when the Ranma anime was broadcast in Italy because it was the first time a story I already read as a manga came out later as an anime on TV.

bravo1102 wrote:
Got my first hentai in the 1990s but I remember watching The Overfiend in 1988 when it was brand new. Had no clue what I was watching but only knew it was messed up and really couldn't follow the translated script.

In Australia things were a bit different.
Anime had always been around but it was never called that.
We just thought of it as really GOOD quality animation where characters actually looked like real people and the stories weren't always dumb and babyish. American stuff was made for kids usually and the characters were often hyper stylised and blobby with silly voices. When they did more realistic characters they still weren't great- Super friends, MASK, GI JOE, Jem and the Holograms, He-Man… but they did get better!

In the mid 90s was when a few companies started marketing “MANGA entertainment” and “Japanimation”, as if it was all completely new.
The Overfiend, Wicked City, Akira, and a whole bunch of other hyper violent, sexy anime movies went on the art film circuit.
A whole bunch of hyper violent anime videos started showing up at the video rental places, usually cyberpunk stuff like AD Police, Angel Cop, bubblegum crisis etc.

They were all marketed as Anime or Manga animation as if they were a whole NEW genre that had just been discovered. It was so dumb, but I was just glad that finally their was a name for the style and there was more of it around. I devoured it. I never liked the violence but I loved the style.

To be perfectly honest, when DBZ came out I was VERY underwhelmed- it had badly down characters and scenery, a bad plot, scenes that were massively expanded when they shouldn't have been, and we're basically dropped right into the middle of a story with no context as to who anyone is or how they know each other…

ALL of the blame rests on Cartoon Network for that. They only showed the original Dragon Ball series a few years after DBZ and didn't even show very much of it at that… only up to the first Red Robot thing or just after the first major tournament.
If they'd actually shown the whole thing first then we'd have understand that DBZ wasn't badly drawn, that was just the style from the original show. The characters and their relationships would have been already introduced. The humour would have made perfect sense. And we'd have understood that the expansion stuff and all the screaming and powering up was just part of the show's transition into a Shonen fighting series, hence all the cliches.

Cartoon network and their terrible Toonami thing messed it all up XD
Cartoon Network were THE worst with any anime back in the day. They'd show a few episodes of something. Then stop. Then start repeating those few endlessly for 6 months till they got a few more episodes.
They ruined YU Yu Hakusho, Gundamn, like that and many others.
Before that they had this TERRIBLE anime called something like “Ninja Space Robots” XD