Passing of Akira Toriyama, the Father of Dragon Ball

The father of Dragon Ball has passed away. Upon hearing the news of his death, thousands of Italian fans will surely have reminisced about rushing home from school to not miss the latest episode of Dragon Ball, which, after an initial broadcast on Junior Tv, was aired right after lunch by Italia 1 starting from the late '90s, already a confirmed success. A break in front of the television, almost always still with a cathode ray tube at the time, that marked a generation, which now affectionately pays tribute on social media to Akira Toriyama, the creator of the manga series from which the cartoon was adapted, who passed away at the age of 68 on March 1st, but the news was only released today. Toriyama is one of the most beloved comic artists of all time, not only in Japan. His works, in fact, have crossed national borders, like few others in the manga scene, probably due to the subtle irony that distinguished them, capable of targeting some of the fixed points of Japanese culture, mocking for example the figure of the master drawn with the flaws and weaknesses of the common man. His characters, characterized by fixations and oddities and by the cult of everything that was considered cute, or somehow strange, in his homeland, gradually conquered the Western world, including through merchandising. Born in 1955 in Nagoya, in the Aichi Prefecture, in central Japan, Toriyama began drawing from a young age. He was particularly struck by The Hundred and One Dalmatians, the Disney movie that inspired the round and small figures, often in contrast to those of other shonen manga, mainly aimed at a male audience, that characterized all his comics, like in Dragon Ball, but even before in Dr. Slump. Among the peculiarities of his work was also that of immortalizing the people close to him: his wife, his colleagues, but above all his editor Kazuhiko Torishima whom the author mocked for his weakness towards beautiful girls. His stories often challenged the rules of common sense, such as when the comic strips were only partially drawn and the characters moved through the white spaces between one strip and another. Published in the weekly Shukan Shonen Jump from 1980 to 1984 and in Italy more than a decade later by Star Comics, Dr. Slump was his first series to have a global impact and earned him the Shōgakukan Award, one of the most prestigious in the country. The manga, from which two animated series were derived, tells the story of a bachelor inventor, a lover of women, who creates Arale, a robot girl who then becomes the true protagonist of the series. Naive, severely myopic, Arale has great physical strength, which becomes a continuous source of trouble in the village animated by funny anthropomorphic animals and caricatural versions of science fiction characters, taken from movies like Godzilla, Star Wars, and Star Trek. One of the symbols of the series is the pink poop, which the animals leave on the street and which the protagonists look at perplexedly and touch with a finger. However, Toriyama's success came particularly with Dragon Ball, serialized first from 1984 to 1995 in the magazine Weekly Shonen Jump and then published in 42 volumes, which sold more than 260 million copies worldwide. Drawing inspiration from the classic Chinese literature Journey to the West and for the fights from Jackie Chan movies, Dragon Ball narrates the adventures of Son Goku, as he trains in martial arts and explores the world, meeting friends and foes that threaten peace, in search of seven magic spheres, capable of summoning a dragon able to grant a wish. His irony particularly returns in the character of Muten, Son Goku's martial arts master, who has a weakness for young and pretty girls, who reject, even energetically, his advances. The manga generated a series of anime, like Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball Super, soundtracks, video games, and other merchandising-related content and was an inspiration for many other comic artists, so much so that for the 40th anniversary of the first release some covers of the 42 volumes were redone by other famous artists.