Toriyama Akira was born on April 5, 1955 in Aichi Prefecture. He graduated as a graphic designer from the Prefectural Industrial High School and then started working in an advertising firm. He was working in the industry when his first manga "Wonderland" was published in Shounen Jump in 1978. "Today's Highlight Island" came out the year after then came "Tomato Girl Detective". Then his first major success came in 1980 with "Dr. Slump" which lasted until 1985 with the Anime TV series airing after the manga has been published for only 5 weeks, something which had never happened before in Japan.

While doing big manga projects, Toriyama-sensei also published short stories like "Pola & Roid" which won a Shounen Jump artist contest in 1981. Other short stories also followed such as "Escape" in 1982, "Chobit" and "Pink" in 1983. Finally, his most famous work "Dragon Ball" began in Shounen Jump in November 1984, which sold over 100,000,000 copies as of 1995.

"Dragonball" ran for ten years and would've still continued if not for the hectic weekly schedule Toriyama-sensei has to go through. As much as possible, he likes to draw manga for leisure only so that he can have more time for himself and his family. Due to insistent public demand, Bandai created the Anime series "Dragon Ball GT" as a sort of continuation of the manga. Toriyama-sensei was not the one responsible for the new storyline but he still worked as a consultant for the series.

Besides making mangas, he also server as character designer for several video games for Super Famicom (Super Nintendo) and Sony Playstation like "Dragon Quest", "Torneko Big Adventure", "Chrono Trigger", and "Tobal No.1".

Sources: Dragon Ball Mirage, Dragon Ball Dimension