Akira Toriyama never stopped growing up

polygon.com:

Before I saw Dragon Ball on VHS tapes in American flea markets and airing on Toonami, I saw it on TV in Guatemala, crowding around a tiny set with distant cousins I barely knew, in a language I had little command of. I learned to say Goku in Spanish before I did in English — you stress the second syllable a little more, let that last vowel ring out just a bit longer. Go-khoo. I didn’t know it at the time, but Dragon Ball — and Akira Toriyama, its creator — would follow me my whole life.

For an entire generation all over the world, Akira Toriyama was anime. Alongside a handful of works like Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon, Toriyama’s Dragon Ball was the medium’s trailblazer, the first step for many fans’ long journey in anime, or perhaps even the destination itself. His red-hot popularity on Dragon Ball would peak multiple times, first as a manga, then as multiple anime series. In between all that, he would also go on to influence a third medium, working as the artist and designer for Yuji Horii’s Dragon Quest and its many, many sequels and spinoffs — casually creating perhaps the most iconic monster design in all of video games.

Even with the infinite space afforded by the internet, it would take a long time for even a modest accounting of Toriyama’s influence on popular culture. Toriyama’s work is foundational, lying in the bedrock of everything that came after it: His characters were namechecked by rappers, his approach to action molded countless conflicts on page and screen, his merch ran the gamut from clothing of dubious legitimacy to a whole damn Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float.

Akira Toriyama’s work on Dragon Ball started out largely for and about young boys, but then he never stopped making it. And in turn, those boys — both in his fiction and his audience — grew up. It’s worth stressing how unusual this was and still is: While shonen manga and anime are famously long-lived, its characters rarely age to the same degree, or transition into a generational