Akira Toriyama's Early Career: The Failures Before Dragon Ball

Akira Toriyama did not want to be a manga artist when he grew up. He wanted to draw, certainly — he had drawn obsessively since childhood — but the specific ambition to create serialized manga for a weekly anthology magazine was not part of his plan when he graduated from an industrial design program in Aichi Prefecture and took a job at an advertising agency doing graphic design work. He was 23 years old, and the career was steady and unremarkable, and then one day in 1977 he saw an advertisement in a magazine announcing a manga contest with a cash prize.

Toriyama entered the contest primarily for the money. He submitted a short comic story, received encouraging feedback from the judges, and decided to submit work to Weekly Shonen Jump's editorial department. They rejected him. He submitted again. They rejected him again. A third submission, a one-shot story called "Wonder Island," was finally accepted and published in 1978 — Toriyama's first professional publication, produced by a man who had spent three years submitting work before anyone said yes.

The break that changed everything was his relationship with Kazuhiko Torishima, the Weekly Shonen Jump editor assigned to work with new talent. Torishima was famously demanding — he rejected Toriyama's early submissions repeatedly, pushing him to develop a cleaner line, faster pacing, and more genuinely funny gags. It was an adversarial mentorship, and Toriyama later credited Torishima's dissatisfaction with developing skills that might never have emerged without that pressure.

"Dr. Slump," which launched in 1980, was the series that established Toriyama as a major talent. The gag comedy about a brilliant but ridiculous inventor and his android daughter Arale was an immediate hit, winning the Shogakukan Manga Award and establishing Toriyama's distinctive visual humor and impossibly clean artwork. It ran for five years and sold tens of millions of copies — by any measure a career-defining success. Toriyama, exhausted by the weekly schedule, then asked his editor if he could end it and start something new.

Dragon Ball began in 1984 as a loose comedic adventure, intended by Toriyama to be relatively short. The series that would sell over 260 million copies, spawn multiple television series, films, and video game franchises, and define the battle shonen genre for generations — began as a tired man's attempt to try something different before he burned out completely.