Akira Toriyama
Japanese manga artist (1955–2024)
Why this is trending
Interest in “Akira Toriyama” spiked on Wikipedia on 2026-02-24.
Categorised under Entertainment, this article fits a familiar pattern. Articles in the entertainment category often trend when tied to award ceremonies, film releases, celebrity news, or viral social media moments.
At GlyphSignal we surface these trending signals every day—transforming Wikipedia’s vast pageview data into actionable insights about global curiosity.
Key Takeaways
- Akira Toriyama (Japanese: 鳥山明 , Hepburn: Toriyama Akira ; April 5, 1955 – March 1, 2024) was a Japanese manga artist and character designer.
- Toriyama first achieved mainstream recognition for creating the manga series Dr.
- He earned the 1981 Shogakukan Manga Award for best shōnen / shōjo series.
- It was adapted into an anime, with a second series created in 1997, 13 years after the manga ended.
- It became one of the best-selling manga series of all time, with 260 million copies sold worldwide, and is considered a key work in increasing manga circulation to its peak in the mid-1980s and mid-1990s.
Akira Toriyama (Japanese: 鳥山明, Hepburn: Toriyama Akira; April 5, 1955 – March 1, 2024) was a Japanese manga artist and character designer. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors in the history of manga and created numerous highly influential and popular series, with his most famous being Dragon Ball.
Toriyama first achieved mainstream recognition for creating the manga series Dr. Slump, which was serialized in Shueisha's Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine. He earned the 1981 Shogakukan Manga Award for best shōnen/shōjo series. Dr. Slump went on to sell over 35 million copies in Japan. It was adapted into an anime, with a second series created in 1997, 13 years after the manga ended. Toriyama wrote and illustrated the Dragon Ball manga from 1984 to 1995. It became one of the best-selling manga series of all time, with 260 million copies sold worldwide, and is considered a key work in increasing manga circulation to its peak in the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. Overseas, Dragon Ball's anime adaptations have been more successful than the manga and similarly boosted anime's international popularity.
Beside his manga works, Toriyama acted as a character designer for numerous video games such as Square Enix's Dragon Quest series and Chrono Trigger, in addition to Blue Dragon.
In 2019, Toriyama was decorated a Chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his contributions to the arts. In October 2024, Toriyama was posthumously inducted into the Harvey Awards Hall of Fame.
Content sourced from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0
