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Akira Toriyama - Creator of Dragonball/Z
He debuted in 1979 with the story Wonder Island, published in Weekly Shonen Jump magazine, and first gained popularity for the anime and manga series Dr. Slump, originally serialized weekly in Shonen Jump from 1980 to 1984. In 1984, Toriyama was responsible for developing Dragon Ball which was initially serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump. It became an instant accomplishment — primarily selling over 35,000,000 copies in Japan, Dragon Ball eventually became a record-breaking best seller with over 120,000,000 copies sold. Aside from the Japanese fame, the series was equally successful worldwide as well, including in the United States and Latin America. Toriyama is mostly acknowledged for his hit series Dragon Ball. This work was one of the linchpins for what is accepted 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 and the entire Dragon Ball storyline extends to almost 9,000 pages. Moreover, the benefit of the manga led to an animated television series; it brought forth the famed Dragon Ball Z, numerous feature-length animated movies, several video games, and mega-merchandising. Though Toriyama had been planning to end the Dragon Ball manga series for quite a while, his editors agreed to let him end the manga so he could "take some new steps in life," as he put it. However, due to the popularity of the series, the anime still continued with Dragon Ball GT. Toriyama was still involved in the project by supervision, although in a limited way. The Dragon Ball anime series altogether spawned over 500 episodes made in Japan, and are produced and licensed for North America and Australia by FUNimation. Toriyama's clean line and design sense led to jobs designing characters for the phenomenally popular Dragon Quest series of role-playing games (formerly called Dragon Warrior in the United States). Toriyama has also served as the character designer for the Super Famicom/SNES RPG Chrono Trigger and the 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 self-parody Neko Majin.