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Akira Toriyama (鳥山 明 Toriyama Akira) is a Japanese manga artist. He was born on April 5, 1955.

He debuted in 1978 with the Wonder Island story published in Weekly Shonen Jump, and gained fame for Dr. Slump, serialized weekly in Shonen Jump from 1980 to 1984.

He is probably best known for the Dragon Ball series (the second part of the manga in the United States is known as Dragon Ball Z to reduce confusion for American audiences). This series was one of the linchpins for what is known as the Golden Age of Jump. Its success "forced" Toriyama to work on Dragon Ball from 1984 to 1995. During that eleven-year period, he produced 42 volumes. Each volume has an average of 200 pages, so the entire Dragon Ball storyline extends to almost 10,000 pages. Moreover, the success of Dragon Ball led to an animated television series, feature-length animated movies, video games, and mega-merchandising.

His clean line and design sense led to jobs designing characters for the phenomenally popular Dragon QuestDragon Quest ( Japanese: ), known as Dragon Warrior in North America, is a series of RPGs created by Enix, now Square Enix. It has graced the MSX, Famicom, Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Famicom (dubbed as Super Nintendo Entertainment System for the series of video games (called Dragon Warrior in the United States). He has also served as the character designer for the Super FamicomSNES, though the controllers are almost the same. The console is similar to the European SNES. Super Famicom ( Japanese:) was a videogame console released by Nintendo in Japan. For information about the North American and European versions of this console and Super Nintendo RPGThis article is about traditional role-playing games. See video and computer role-playing games for their digital counterparts. A role-playing game RPG is a type of game where players assume the roles of fictional characters via role-playing. In fact, man Chrono TriggerChrono Trigger is a role-playing video game that was released in Japan on March 11, 1995 for the Super Famicom and in North America on August 22, 1995 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES); it was re-released in 2001 for the Sony PlayStation and the popular Tobal No. 1Tobal No. 1 is a fighting game for the PlayStation developed by Dream Factory and released by Squaresoft around 1996. Its strongest selling point was having characters designed by Akira Toriyama of Dragon Ball fame. The game itself runs at smooth 60fps du PlayStation fighting game, and continues to produce the occasional manga story. His works after Dragon Ball were short (100-200 pages) stories, including Cowa! , Kajika , Sandland, and one-shots, like the spoof Neko Majin Z.