Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball and so much more, passed away this month. I learned about it last night (on the 7th of March, since I’m writing this on the 8th and you’re reading this on or after the 15th) and have spent the last day reflecting on the impact he had on my life. I don’t really talk about it a whole lot (because it was more than two decades ago and for other reasons that will become apparent soon), but I got into manga, comics, and graphic novels as a whole because of Dragon Ball. Before finding those bright red volumes on the “new” shelf at my local library one day when I’d ridden my bike there for some books to read, my entire conception of comics was confined to the syndicated comics that ran in newspapers, so much so that I didn’t call them comics. I called them “funnies” because they showed up in the “funny pages” of the newspaper. Sure, I’d read tons of picture books as a kid and a few things that rode a fine line between graphic novels and picture books, and sure, I knew what comic books were, but they’d never been a part of my life before I picked up one of the brightly colored books and was transported to a whole new world via a whole new type of story. That moment, that first borrowing of the first Dragon Ball book, was a major inflection point in my life to the degree that I can’t even imagine the person I’d be if I never picked it up. The change wasn’t drastic in the moment, but it laid the groundwork that I’ve built a huge portion of my life on since then.

First and foremost, getting into comics, manga, and graphic novels is what inspired me to tell my own stories. Before than, I’d had plenty of imagination and led my younger siblings in games of make-believe, but a lot of that had been stomped out by my parents shortly before this pivotal moment. We’d been too into playing pretend in the fictional world of Harry Potter, so our mother said we were worshipping a false idol and then used that as the catalyst to make us (mostly me) rid ourselves of our Harry Potter stuff so she would stop catching flak from the other parents in the homeschooling group we were a part of (to this day, I’m still a little annoyed that my parents were presciently right Harry Potter, even if they were right for some of the most wrong reasons). Dragon Ball, and manga as a whole, moved in to fill the void in my life that was left when the thing I was most interested in at the time was taken away from me and the local library was doing a great job of bringing in a bunch of the early popular manga as it began to more rapidly pour into the US in the early 00s. This love of comics and visual storytelling, even though I couldn’t draw worth a damn and didn’t really have the chance to develop that skill thanks to my horrible childhood, is what connected me to my closest friends in high school and what gave me a common bridge to connect with people in college. Almost everyone my age knew who Goku was, after all, and while I’d never watched the anime, I knew enough from reading all the manga to participate.

Another side of this particular world expansion, which goes hand-in-hand with the friends I made in high school, was the idea that I could make my own stories on my own. I could create worlds, entirely fictional events (or ones that seemed entirely fictional at the time but wound up being deeply rooted in the unprocessed trauma of my childhood), and didn’t need to do it in the public, easily-overheard or ruined space of make-believe in my parents’ home. I could just write it all down. It never occurred to me that I could just start doing that on my own with going through some unknown and largely mythological process to Become A Writer. After all, my parents were raising me as a miniature parent and math whiz. They wanted me to become an engineer, to use my smarts to follow in their footsteps and become a part of whatever life they’d envisioned when they got married and decided to have kids rather than go to therapy and figure out why they felt like they had gaping holes in their lives.

My parents never encouraged my art or my storytelling or anything but my mathematical skills and ability to take care of my younger siblings. You know who did, though? Who had little sections in all of his books about how easy it was to tell stories, about the work of becoming a storyteller? Toriyama. The little sections about his life and his work, about the things he did, slowly broke through the layer of mythology I’d used to hide what I knew I always wanted to do but that my parents would never accept or encourage. The little robot version of himself (Robotoriyama) was the first bit of encouragement I ever got and though it took years until I finally tried it for myself (and a lot of inspiration from my high school friends who were creating their own comics and telling their own stories), reading those little encouragements in his various manga over the years is what made me think I could do it at all.

The other, entirely tangential aspect of this is that I was one of those kids who needed libraries. I needed a place where I could go, borrow whatever books I wanted, and nothing I did would be reported to my parents. They, of course, could monitor me, but the upside to being their responsible, emotionally neglected child was that they stopped checking my books around the time they trusted me to ride to the library on my own. They’d try to look at everything I read, to make sure it fell within the bounds of what they’d decided was permissible for me at the time (which was pretty limited to older books, the common Scholastic fare, books they’d already read, and the children’s section at the library, ESPECIALLY after the Harry Potter divestment), but they wouldn’t look too closely. This meant that I could pick up any comic at the library and they’d assume it was fine since it looked cartoonish. And then, as I proved “trustworthy,” they stopped checking and all I had to do was not get caught with books they wouldn’t approve of. This process of riding my bike to the library or sneakily checking out my books early during our every-other-week trips to the library (part of our homeschooling curriculum that also, conveniently, got us out of the house while the cleaning service took care of most of the cleaning so my mom could focus on her four, soon to be five, children) meant that I could read whatever I wanted. This was the first time that being independent and responsible for myself was actually a positive thing.

These trips to the library eventually grew into trips to the local comic shop where I could buy manga that the library didn’t have. Their collections were always spotty, so I had lots of gaps to fill in on my own and then entirely new series that this little, fairly conservative library wouldn’t stock. Nothing scandalous or pornographic or anything like that, just stuff they wouldn’t spend their limited budget on, or that people weren’t donating. This continued for years, from my first longer bike rides on my own to when I would walk the half-mile from the Aldi or K-Mart that my mother was shopping at to the comic shop, to when I finally had a driver’s license, access to a car, and a part-time job that earned me enough money to buy more than one volume a month. These little excursions were the foundation for learning to be genuinely independent and self-reliant rather than just being independent enough to take care of my younger siblings and self-reliant enough that they’d trust me to stay home alone or babysit my younger siblings, but still largely under their control and reliant on them to provide for myself. Without these trips, without this first bit of breaking rules by omission as I pushed against the boundaries haphazardly laid across my life, I doubt I’d have actually moved out when I went to college. I wouldn’t have been able to make a clean break from them. I’d have probably gone back to the suburbs of Chicago after I graduated and still be living there to this day.

Or who knows. Maybe I’d still be fine. Maybe I’d be worse. I genuinely can’t guess what I’d be like without this one moment where I saw a brightly colored book on a mostly empty shelf and decided to take a look since it seemed like something my parents would be fine with. I can count on one hand the number of moments like that in my life and every single other one of them has only one axis of change. This one has two and might be the most absolutely normal but ultimately profound thing that has ever happened to me. All because of one man’s art and storytelling and the incredible way that it has not only lasted decades, but driven entire cultural shifts. Without Dragon Ball, I do not know that anime and manga would have landed in the US as strongly as they did. I can’t imagine what else might have filled the cultural space that it STILL holds to this day, almost FOUR DECADES later. Four decades! And Toriyama was still working, still creating new stuff to share with the world. I don’t have the expertise or space in the blog post to go into it all, but his body of work includes a limited-run electric car, the character design for my favorite classic RPG (Chrono Trigger), tons of the design work for one of the most famous line of RPGs ever (Dragon Quest), and so much more manga than just Dragon Ball and its descendants. It is staggering, the amount of work this man has done. Several posts I’ve seen over the last day have compared his cultural weight to Shakespeare, given Toriyama’s place at the foundation of so many modern manga and anime series, and I’m genuinely confident that’s a pretty fair assessment. We might be tempted to paint everything more brightly due to our nostalgia and grief, but I feel pretty certain it’s well-deserved, especially considering how he made it through his entire career without any horrible scandals and in what seemed, from the distant outside, like good spirits.

I hope that, wherever he is, he’s resting well and can enjoy the way that everyone is speaking about him now. I hope he knows how loved and respected he was. I hope he knows that, sometimes, all it took to make a friend was a Goku shirt and a brief exchange of “Goku? Goku!” I hope he knows how much the world loved his work. And how absolutely amazing he was at drawing mechanical things like planes, bikes, robots, and so on. His attention to detail was staggering. I know everyone has a story about the way their life was changed by someone like him, but this is mine and I have literally nothing else from my childhood that I’m actually glad played out like this did. I do not think it is hyperbole to say it was that one moment of slow but powerful change that enabled me to save myself and become the (mostly) healthy and creative person I am today. Rest in Peace, Akira Toriyama.