Everyone is sitting here agape in shock.
We’ve lost the most influential illustrator who ever lived.
As I think of Toriyama being gone, all that runs thru my head is countless images of middle school kids drawing Gohan in class, or how I first started understanding how to draw—like conceiving in any way, shape or form how to create a human-esque figure out of lines, by tracing over images from a DBZ coloring book.
When I was a kid, Dragon Ball Z was practically ubiquitous with boys. It didn’t appeal to me as much as cutesier fair like Pokemon, but I was fascinated by its continuous narrative and lore, which I would always learn about from other kids who were excited to share whatever they’d read online or in magazines about stuff that happens later in the story which hadn’t made it to the US broadcast yet.
I remember the images that ghostlightning put into my head when he described how groups of guys would be gathered outside of TV stores in Manila watching the end of the Freiza saga thru the front windows. I think about the news reports of the massive parade that followed the end of the manga’s historical run in Shounen Jump, which would define what popular manga has been ever since. From the world of manga, the only success stories which parallel DBZ are from authors who took influence from it directly, such as One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda and Naruto creator Masashi Kishimoto. I understood how influential Toriyama was even as a child because of these authors writing about how they were inspired by Dragon Ball in their collected volumes’ afterwords.
Even more mind-blowing to me was when I learned how Dragon Ball wasn’t even the only ridiculously influential thing the guy had done. Besides the huge gag manga he’d become first known for in Japan, Dr. Slump, I didn’t even know as a kid about his towering contributions to video game art design, between the single-most influential RPG series ever, Dragon Quest, and what is considered by a huge number of people to be one of the greatest video games ever made, Chrono Trigger. Over time, these stories all have only grown in reputation and influence, to the point that it’s incredibly difficult to imagine a person with a deeper interest in manga, anime or RPGs who’s never come across any of Toriyama’s work.
It is impossible to imagine the modern landscape of artwork without Toriyama’s influence. If Disney or Marvel comics had ever had one singular artstyle than maybe someone else could compete, but Toriyama is the only artist ever whose singular, trademark style of drawing made everything he worked on into one of the most popular things that ever existed in his category; and it effected the way that every illustrator would understand drawing from that point forward. I don’t think there’s ever been another person who’s effected the way that as many people draw as Toriyama did.
Nobody was prepared to deal with this loss, and Toriyama was in the middle of a bunch of active projects at the time of his death, with an upcoming Sandland adaptation and the continuing Dragon Ball Super manga series. I feel like we all expected to have this man around for a lot longer, with more time to celebrate him as the God that he was. It’s difficult even to process the idea that the guy who made DRAGON BALL was alive yesterday, and isn’t anymore right now. The world just feels like a completely different place with that in mind; like a whole artistic era just came to an end, because we’ll never have a new Toriyama.
I’m writing this mostly just to process it myself, and because I know that others will need help in processing this, because I’ve been sitting on twitter retweeting everyone else’s sentiments for an hour trying to figure out where there is emotional closure in the loss of an unparalleled legend. I expect the ruminations of this loss to echo in the streets of humanity for some time to come. Thanks for everything, Toriyama-sensei.