Akira Toriyama, Two Years After: What Dragon Ball Actually Did to Manga

Akira Toriyama died on March 1, 2024, of an acute subdural hematoma. He was 68. Shueisha announced his death on March 8, 2024, in a brief statement noting that he had recently completed his work on the Dragon Ball Daima anime project and that further posthumous involvement in the franchise was unlikely.

Two years later, in 2026, what Toriyama built across his career is more visible than it was during his life. Dragon Ball — the manga (1984-1995, 519 chapters, 42 volumes), the anime (1986-1989), Dragon Ball Z (1989-1996), Dragon Ball Super (2015-present), the films, the games, the merchandising universe — is the single most globally recognized manga property of all time. Not just in terms of sales (over 280 million volumes), but in terms of being the entry point for tens of millions of readers and viewers who would not have engaged with manga otherwise.

This is what Dragon Ball actually accomplished structurally, and what the post-Toriyama period looks like for both the franchise and for manga publishing as a whole.

What Toriyama did before Dragon Ball

It’s worth remembering that Toriyama’s career started with Dr. Slump (1980-1984), which ran for 18 volumes and was, at the time, one of Weekly Shonen Jump’s most popular series. Dr. Slump established Toriyama’s reputation as a comedic-action mangaka with distinctive character design and a clean, accessible art style. The success of Dr. Slump bought him the editorial latitude to attempt a more ambitious serialized work, which became Dragon Ball.

What’s structurally interesting about Dr. Slump is that you can see Toriyama working out the visual language he would deploy in Dragon Ball. The character design conventions (the round eyes, the distinctive hair, the clean linework), the action choreography (clear panel-to-panel staging that prioritizes reader comprehension over visual density), the genre-blending (sci-fi elements mixed with rural Japan settings) — all of them are present in Dr. Slump in less developed form.

The Dragon Ball method

Dragon Ball ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from December 1984 to May 1995. The structural achievement of the manga is harder to summarize than it should be, because the conventions it established are now so naturalized that they feel inevitable.

The training arc. Before Dragon Ball, the standard shonen action plot was about the protagonist’s natural ability being tested against escalating enemies. Toriyama formalized the training arc as a structural element — the protagonist explicitly leaves the main plot for an extended training period and returns transformed. This is now the dominant convention in shonen action manga.

Power escalation as plot. Each major arc in Dragon Ball involves an enemy stronger than the previous, requiring the protagonist to become stronger to match them. This sounds obvious but it was, in 1984, not how serialized manga structured itself. Earlier shonen typically had stable protagonist abilities with the variation coming from situational challenges. Toriyama made the protagonist’s measurable strength the manga’s primary structural element.

The tournament arc. Dragon Ball did not invent the martial arts tournament structure, but it established it as a default arc type for shonen manga. The 22nd, 23rd, and Cell Game tournaments are templates that subsequent series (Yu Yu Hakusho’s Dark Tournament, Naruto’s Chunin Exams, My Hero Academia’s Sports Festival) directly reference.

Clear visual choreography. Toriyama’s panel-to-panel action sequences are designed to be readable at speed. A reader can track the spatial relationship between fighters across a multi-page fight without effort. This is harder than it looks and is something many subsequent mangaka have struggled to replicate.

These four structural elements — the training arc, the power escalation, the tournament arc, the clear choreography — are the foundation of modern shonen action manga. Every long-running shonen serialized after 1995 (Naruto, Bleach, One Piece’s action arcs, Hunter x Hunter’s structured combat, My Hero Academia, Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man) is, at the structural level, working from the Dragon Ball template. Sometimes consciously, sometimes not.

The international reach question

Dragon Ball’s specific impact on global manga readership is the harder thing to quantify but probably more important than the structural impact on shonen craft.

For most non-Japanese readers under 50, Dragon Ball is the manga that made manga readable. The franchise had advantages that made it travel well: the visual style is universally legible, the genre blending is accessible to viewers from any culture, the protagonist’s character (Goku’s straightforward optimism) translates without losing impact, and the action sequences require no cultural context to enjoy.

The Cartoon Network broadcast of Dragon Ball Z in the late 1990s in the United States, and the parallel international broadcasts across Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, exposed approximately 200 million people to anime who had not previously encountered the form. Many of these viewers became long-term anime fans. The current adult anime audience — the people in their 30s and 40s who watch Crunchyroll and buy Blu-rays — is largely the cohort that started with Dragon Ball Z.

For Arabic-language audiences specifically, Dragon Ball Z’s broadcast on Spacetoon and various regional channels in the late 1990s and 2000s was the dominant cultural anime moment. Most Arabic-speaking adults who watch anime in 2026 started with Dragon Ball Z. The franchise’s role in establishing manga and anime as legitimate forms in the Arab world is, structurally, what the post-Toriyama market is building on.

Dragon Ball Super and the late period

Toriyama’s late involvement with Dragon Ball Super (2015-present, both manga by Toyotarō and anime by Toei Animation) was supervisory rather than direct. He plotted the major arcs and approved the story directions, but the day-to-day writing and art were handled by the production team. This was, by most accounts, a reasonable workload for a 60-year-old mangaka who had already given the franchise three decades.

What Dragon Ball Super accomplished was extending the franchise’s commercial relevance into a new generation. The 2015-2018 anime introduced Dragon Ball to viewers born after the original series ended. The manga’s continuing serialization keeps the property visible in shonen publishing. The 2024 Dragon Ball Daima anime — Toriyama’s final direct involvement — closed out his work on the franchise with a project clearly designed to be a creative coda rather than a major franchise expansion.

The question of what happens to Dragon Ball Super and its associated properties without Toriyama’s involvement is, in 2026, still being worked out. Toyotarō continues the manga; Toei continues to produce anime; the licensing universe continues. Whether any of it produces the kind of cultural impact Dragon Ball had during Toriyama’s active period is unclear.

Toriyama’s other work

Beyond Dragon Ball, Toriyama produced Dr. Slump, Sand Land (1999-2000), Cowa! (1997-1998), Kajika (1998), and various shorter manga and one-shots. He also did the character designs for the Dragon Quest video game series (1986-present), the Chrono Trigger SNES RPG (1995), and Blue Dragon (2007), among other game work.

The Dragon Quest character design work is arguably his second most influential contribution to global pop culture after Dragon Ball. The franchise has been one of Japan’s most successful video game series since 1986, and Toriyama’s character work shaped the visual language of JRPGs for decades. Modern game designers (including FromSoftware, Square Enix’s current generation, and Atlus) have all credited Toriyama as an influence.

The 2023 Sand Land anime adaptation (Studio Tezuka and ILCA, theatrical release) and the related 2024 Sand Land: The Series anime did proper work on a manga that had been overlooked relative to Dragon Ball. The reception was warm but limited — Sand Land is structurally a tighter, more contained work than Dragon Ball, and that limited its commercial reach.

The encyclopedia entries for all of Toriyama’s published manga, with publication history and ratings from MyAnimeList and AniList, cover Dragon Ball, Dr. Slump, Sand Land, and his other works. The Dragon Ball franchise alone is at the Dragon Ball anime page.

What manga publishing looks like without Toriyama

Two years into the post-Toriyama period, the most honest assessment is that shonen publishing continues without major structural change, but a particular kind of creative voice is gone.

What Toriyama specifically brought — the comedic-action register that doesn’t lean on irony, the optimism that the protagonist’s straightforward decency would resolve increasingly impossible challenges, the visual language designed to be legible to readers without manga literacy — does not have an obvious successor. Hiromu Arakawa works in a related register. Eiichiro Oda has carried elements of Toriyama’s approach into One Piece. But the specific combination that defined Dragon Ball is, as a creative project, finished.

What remains is the institution. Shueisha continues to manage the Dragon Ball IP. The various anime studios continue to produce content. The global merchandise operation continues. The franchise as a commercial entity is in no danger.

What’s worth understanding about Toriyama’s legacy in 2026 is that he created a manga that, by virtue of its specific qualities, became the gateway for global engagement with the form. The current adult readership of manga in Western and Arab markets exists largely because Dragon Ball was accessible to people who weren’t already manga readers. That accessibility is what shonen publishing is now trying to maintain in a more competitive global media environment, and it is, structurally, what Toriyama left behind.