68-year-old "Dragon Ball" creator Akira Toriyama passes away

The very influential and well-known “Dragon Ball” comics and anime cartoons, Akira Toriyama from Japan has died on Friday at the age of 68, according to his production team.

One of the all-time best-selling manga series, “Dragon Ball” debuted in serial form in 1984 and has since inspired a plethora of anime series, motion pictures, and video games.

A message made to the official “Dragon Ball” account on X, formerly Twitter, stated that Toriyama passed away on March 1 due to a blood clot on his brain.

“Big shoes to fill” – According to Animage Plus, a division of the anime magazine Animage, Toriyama studied design in an industrial high school after being born in 1955 in the central Aichi region of Japan.

“He would have many more things to achieve. However, he has left many manga titles and works of art to this world,” the statement added.

“We hope that everyone will continue to love Akira Toriyama’s unique world of creation for a very long time.”

In “Dragon Ball,” a young boy by the name of Son Goku battles wicked villains to defend Earth with the aid of his allies by gathering magical balls containing dragons.

When Toriyama started working on “Dragon Ball,” he was already well-known for his humor manga “Dr Slump” from the early 1980s. He claimed that the Chinese kung fu genre served as inspiration for the series.

In addition to being a member of the design team for the enormously popular “Dragon Quest” video games, Toriyama delivered us the cherished animation “Dragon Ball Z” in the 1990s.

However, not every spin-off has been successful. The live-action 2009 film “Dragonball Evolution” received negative reviews and did poorly at the box office.

The statement credited to Toriyama’s Bird Studio expressed “our deep regret that he still had several works in the middle of creation” and highlighted the artist’s “great enthusiasm”.

“Greatly saddened by the sudden news of his death” was the statement released by publishing house Shueisha, which serialized the “Dragon Ball” comics in its weekly magazine “Shonen Jump.”

Akira Torimaya, before making his professional manga artist debut in his early 20s, spent three years working at a Nagoya advertising agency.

In a 2013 interview, Toriyama called himself a “difficult” person, according to the Asahi newspaper in Japan.

“Considering how it helped someone with a twisted, challenging personality like me do a decent job and get accepted by society, ‘Dragon Ball’ is like a miracle,” he remarked.

He said in the newspaper that his comics were “dedicated to entertainment” and that he had “no idea” why “Dragon Ball” had become such a global sensation.