I fully believe that art can change your DNA. If you are exposed to the right piece of art, in the right mindset, and at the right time, it can change who you are on a fundamental level. The right art at the right time can put a butterfly effect into motion that can put your life on an entirely new trajectory than it had been on before. Over the course of years or even decades, you can wind up being so far apart from where you had been originally going that, for all intents and purposes, you’re an entirely different person than you were going to be before that art entered your life.
I say this because I know this has happened to me. The first big divergence I took was when I, as a very young child, opened my parents’ Sunday newspaper to the comics section and first discovered Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. Between the beautiful watercolor backgrounds, Calvin’s infectiously optimistic and adventure-minded personality, and the basic premise of a young child going on solo adventures with his imaginary best friend (which resonated with me as an only child who moved every few years as a kid), Calvin and Hobbes was the first piece of art to alter my DNA. It made me want to draw, to create, to tell stories. It made me want to seek out adventure in the mundane, in the quiet moments when I was by myself. It made my brain more pliant, more open, and more receptive to art on whole.
Shortly after first falling in love with Calvin and Hobbes, I signed up for cartooning classes at a local art center. I met and was taught by an incredible instructor named Ron Hill who is still out there making art to this day. After taking and completing the three classes the art center offered (beginner, intermediate and advanced), me and a few friends I made from the class kept signing up even though we had exhausted the course material in full. Mr. Hill would pull us to the side, set us up at our own table and continue to help us learn and get better in his gaps teaching the rest of the class. He’d help us with our writing, how to deliver jokes, how to build characters, and kept finding new ways to continue to guide us as we learned the craft of cartooning. I started to create some recurring series, one a spoof of professional baseball, the other a spoof of The X-Files I so creatively titled The Y-Files featuring characters named Boulder and Mullet (she was Scully, but with a mullet – look, I was like nine, okay?). So much of my first artistic expressions came from the love of the comic medium that was instilled in me thanks to Calvin and Hobbes.
Outside of these classes, I continued my journey into the world of art and started to fall in love with different forms of hand-drawn media. I discovered comic books, fell in love with the characters and world of Spider-Man and tried (and failed) to work my way through the influential How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way workbook by John Buscema and Stan Lee. I became a voracious consumer of anything animated, begging my parents to take me to any animated film coming out so I could admire the artwork. But at this same time, I was also just a kid who was into kid things. Kid things like video games. And it’s there, within the world of mid-‘90s video games, that I was first introduced to the artwork of another artist that would change my DNA and who I was as a person.
It was at this time that I first played Chrono Trigger and was introduced to the art of Akira Toriyama.
Chrono Trigger, much like Calvin and Hobbes before it, was another hugely formative piece of early media in my life. While I had always loved videogames as a kid, Chrono Trigger was the first game I had played where I fell in love with the story and the writing. Writing in videogames back then was largely at the “are you a bad enough of a dude to save the president” or “thank you Mario, but our princess is in another castle” level, which was never going to change who I was on a fundamental level. But Chrono Trigger? Chrono Trigger blew my mind. Playing as a spiky-haired protagonist named Crono (the hair will be important later, don’t forget it), Chrono Trigger is an epic, sci-fi/fantasy time-travel story taking place over the course of thousands of years as Crono and his ever-expanding party of allies try to save the world from future ruin from an eldritch abomination named Lavos. There is so much that I want to say about Chrono Trigger as a game and how the game itself changed me, but that will have to wait for another time (thankfully, I will be writing about Chrono Trigger in my Top 100 Games of All-Time series, but you’re going to have to wait quite a while for that as it’s, spoiler-alert, VERY high on that list). But what’s important to this story right now is Crono’s hair. Because today, this is a story about Chrono Trigger’s art style and the man who designed that world.
Believe it or not, there was a time in the US when manga and Japanese animation was incredibly obscure. Growing up in the ‘90s in suburban Ohio, my first exposure to Japanese manga illustration came from an unexpected source. It was the instruction manual for Chrono Trigger. Without even knowing who Akira Toriyama was at the time (or even knowing about his most famous work, Dragon Ball, at all), the artwork in Chrono Trigger immediately made an impression on me. The character design was, on the whole, simple but stylized and followed much of what I had learned from Mr. Hill in my cartooning classes. Characters were immediately recognizable from a quick glance thanks to things like Crono’s bright red, spiky hair, Frog’s huge expressive eyes (I’m not the only person who changes his name to his human name Glenn on subsequent playthroughs, right?), or Lucca’s enormous glasses. Despite being simple in design, their large features allowed them to be incredibly expressive and for emotions to be conveyed quickly and easily, even on something as low-res as the Super Nintendo. And, most interestingly to me, despite how simple and cartoonish they were, the game had an edge to it that I had only really seen in more “mature” art styles like I had seen in things like Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man comics of the time. While simple and cartoonish, one look at Magus and you knew that was a bad dude you should be afraid of. One moment, the large dinosaur standing in your way was charmingly chubby, almost goofy looking, but with a slight change of lighting or expression, it was suddenly a terrifying monstrosity. I had never seen an art style like this one before.
Despite having not even heard the words “anime” or “manga” in my life up to this point, I absolutely fell in love with Toriyama’s art style. While later re-releases of Chrono Trigger would include fully animated cutscenes in Toriyama’s style, just the sprite work in-game and the drawings in the manual were enough for my love of Japanese illustration and animation to begin to take root. It would take a few more years for the seed planted by Toriyama’s artwork in Chrono Trigger to fully blossom and to truly alter my DNA, but unbeknownst to me at the time, a butterfly had flapped its wings and set into motion something that would profoundly change me in the very near future.
Flash forward three years. I’m now 12 years old and Cartoon Network has started airing an after-school animation block called Toonami. From introducing me to drum and bass music which forever changed my musical tastes, to the late ‘90s CG aesthetic that I will always have a soft spot in my heart for, Toonami may be one of the most singularly important works of media when it comes to influencing who I am today. But the thing that got me into Toonami in the first place was a little show called Dragon Ball Z. Well, to be more specific, I got into Toonami because I was a dumb 12-year-old boy and was amused by misreading the title of DBZ as “Dragon Ballz” and tuning in because I was curious what the hell that show even was. It took one episode and I was hooked for life.
The moment I saw the intro, I immediately flashed back to the hours I spent devouring Chrono Trigger a few years earlier. My initial thought of, “Huh, this Goku guy looks a lot like Crono” later led to some late ‘90s internetting which led to some GeoCities webrings which informed me that Goku looked a lot like Crono because they were designed by the same man, Akira Toriyama. But unlike Chrono Trigger, where Toriyama’s art was entirely made up of still images in the instruction manual and low-res sprite-work, Dragon Ball Z was fully animated. For the first time, I got to see that art style in motion. And what I saw in that first episode of Dragon Ball Z was my first real taste of a vast world that I, at the time, knew nothing about. While I had seen examples of Japanese manga illustrations in things like the Chrono Trigger instruction manual, Dragon Ball Z was my first taste of actual, fully realized Japanese animation. Dragon Ball (as I will refer to it from this point forward, as I will be talking about the totality of the interconnected anime and manga series to be a part of this story) was also my first taste of Akira Toriyama’s writing itself. And I was hooked.
Growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s in the US meant that cartoons were largely for children. There were the odd counterexamples here and there like The Simpsons or Ren & Stimpy, but by-and-large, animation was used entirely for children’s media. Because they were for children, these earlier animated shows were very simple and non-challenging when it came to content. There would be a simple black-and-white conflict, some kind of problem that needed solved or villain to be defeated, and the heroes would always save the day within the half-hour run time, resetting the world back to the status quo by the end of the episode. Shredder would create some new mutant to fight against the Ninja Turtles, that new mutant would be hyped up as the biggest threat the Turtles have ever faced, but within twenty-two minutes they’d be defeated and the Turtles would be scarfing down some pizza while Michelangelo cracked some jokes. They were simple and disposable shows. They lacked stakes. Because they were made primarily for children, there was no attempt to give them depth or aim for anything other than a way to entertain a child’s mind for a half-hour so they could ingest a bunch of commercials for breakfast cereals or Micro Machines.
But that’s not how Dragon Ball worked. Unlike any other show I had seen up to that point in my life, Dragon Ball took its time to tell its story. While shows in the ‘90s, including some animated shows, would occasionally have the odd two- or three-part episode here and there, Dragon Ball was entirely told in serial and across multiple series. Every episode directly stemmed from and led into the next, allowing for much longer-term storytelling. When the story begins, our hero Goku is a young child, kind-hearted with an insatiable thirst for adventure and strength well beyond that of a normal child. The original Dragon Ball has a lot of DNA in common with my beloved Calvin and Hobbes. The worlds of both are filled with childlike wonder and adventure. There’s a sense of whimsy to the original Dragon Ball that is absolutely infectious. And Goku and Calvin are, in many ways, very similar characters, only Goku lives in a world where his adventures are actually happening while Calvin’s adventures largely occur in his head. As the story progresses, Goku grows up and eventually becomes a married father by the start of Dragon Ball Z. By the the sequel series, Dragon Ball Super and Dragon Ball GT, Goku is now a grandfather, his adventures taking him from one side of the planet to the other, to the depths of space, backwards and forwards in time, and even to other parallel universes. Dragon Ball was, in many ways, the first show I’ve ever watched that respected my intelligence and my ability to follow along with a story over the course of multiple weeks or months. Instead of watching the same characters, frozen in time, doing the same shit week after week, Dragon Ball allowed characters to change, to age, to grow. Not only did Dragon Ball not feel the need to reset the story to the status quo at the end of every episode, there was no status quo to even begin with.
There are times where Dragon Ball is a time-traveling story involving evil androids that feels inspired by the Terminator movies. There are times where it’s a deeply emotional story about a former villain, Vegeta, realizing through introspection that his childhood exposure to violence and abuse made him a violent abuser and his struggles to atone for his sins and be a better person and father. There are times when it’s a goofy story about Goku and Piccolo having to go to the DMV to renew their driver’s licenses. And then there are times when it’s a story about a kind-hearted pacifist having to grapple with the fact that he’s the only person who can stop a maniacal villain from eradicating all life from the earth. The closest thing to the status quo in Dragon Ball is Goku. The forever child, no matter his age or what he has lived through, still walking through life with that same infectious sense of awe and adventure that he did when we first were introduced to him at the very beginning of the story.
And I think more than anything, this is what resonated the most to me about Akira Toriyama’s writing. While Dragon Ball often has a heavy dose of what I’ll call “Teenage-Boy-Shit” within it, there is an emotional depth and sense of sincerity to it that transcends all the “Teenage-Boy-Shit” that is also there. Growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, so much of the media aimed towards young boys was reductive in how it portrayed masculinity and how it defined strength. Emotions were a thing to be controlled and to be suppressed because strength required mastery and control over your emotions. This was the era of “real men don’t cry” bullshit. Heroes and “real men” were stoic, unemotive, robotic beings. Contrast your average ‘80s or ‘90s action movie hero to Schwarzenegger’s portrayal of the evil killer robot in the original The Terminator and you won’t find much of a difference. But Goku?
He’s Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes trapped in Superman’s body. He’s an adventurous, good-natured child-at-heart who also just happens to be one of the strongest beings in the universe. Unlike nearly every other superhero or action movie hero I grew up with, who were portrayed as supremely capable and possessed a near superhuman level of perfection towards anything they touched, Goku is a goddamn moron. Despite being the ultimate hero of Dragon Ball, he has the intellect of a child, he loses fights and gets his ass beat regularly, he straight up dies in the first real fight of Dragon Ball Z (death as a concept is fairly meaningless in the world of Dragon Ball as there’s a magical dragon who can bring people back to life), he mistakenly lets villains power up or heal rather than finishing fights, he’s often a doofus and irritates his wife and children, his mentor figures often think he’s a complete dipshit. He’s an awkward buffoon, but despite all of that, everybody in the world of Dragon Ball loves him.
And he’s loved because he’s just such an infectiously positive and good person. Throughout the series, his most bitter enemies and rivals often become his closest friends. As a child, he fights the Demon King Piccolo in a duel to the death. The resurrected Piccolo then goes on to become a surrogate father figure to Goku’s son Gohan during a period of time in which Goku was dead (remember what I said about death earlier), and by extension becomes a close member of Goku’s family. Goku and Vegeta start as bitter rivals, fighting each other multiple times throughout the course of Dragon Ball Z. But in the end, one of the very final images we get chronologically in Dragon Ball GT is their great-great-grandchildren continuing their (what grows to eventually become) friendly rivalry in the World Martial Arts Tournament, their friendship continuing to live on in their family lineage past their respective deaths. Hell, even Goku’s ultimate villain, Frieza, eventually finds himself fighting side-by-side with Goku by the end of Dragon Ball Super. While from the outside, Goku’s greatest strength appears to be his superhuman strength, anyone who’s watched or read Dragon Ball knows that it’s actually his superhuman heart. And for me, an awkward, clumsy, dorky teenager who meant well but often had an extremely hard time fitting in, making friends, or just overall feeling competent, man, that fucking resonated with me. Goku wasn’t strong because he was born rich like Batman. He wasn’t strong because of a freak accident like Spider-Man. Goku was strong because he was a good person that tried hard to be a good person.
It’s difficult for me to fully articulate all the ways that Dragon Ball Z has had a profound impact on my life. I will do my best, but writing much of this on the same day that I got the news of Akira Toriyama’s death has been surprisingly emotional. The more I reflect on his art and Dragon Ball, the more I see the impact of it all around me. Both in the obvious ways, like the little Goku I have on my desk, slurping noodles next to King Kai and Bubbles, or the shelves of his manga on the bookshelf to my left. Of course, that bookshelf also has models of Perfect Cell and Future Trunks I built during the pandemic as a way to deal with the non-stop stress and social isolation I was dealing with at the time, as well as figures of Goku and Krillin I won from claw machines once the world finally opened back up. There’s the figure of Shenron on that same shelf, a Christmas gift from my brother-in-law and his girlfriend. There’s the Vegeta figure on my work desk, looking over the coaster that I sip my morning coffee from every morning and the figure of Fused Zamasu (I think my favorite under-rated Dragon Ball Super villain/arc) on my other bookshelf.
But then there are the less obvious impacts. That figure of Fused Zamasu looks over a figure of Spike from Cowboy Bebop. While Cowboy Bebop is easily one of my favorite works of art of all-time, would I have ever given it a chance if Dragon Ball Z didn’t get me interested in anime in the first place? Would I have the various Gunpla models from Gundam Wing throughout my office if DBZ didn’t get me to watch other Toonami shows like Gundam Wing? What about the shelves of Junji Ito, Kazuo Umezawa and Gou Tanabe manga? I’ve always loved horror, but would I have specifically sought out Japanese horror writers/artists like them if not for Akira Toriyama? Would I have ever given other Japanese role-playing games like the Persona series or Final Fantasy a chance if I had never picked up and rented Chrono Trigger as a child? I definitely would not have named my cat after Morgana if I had never played Persona 5 Royal. And if I never played Persona 5 Royal, how would I have gotten through the early months of the pandemic when that game was one of the only things I looked forward to during that time? Would I have ever discovered all of this incredible Japanese art if not for Akira Toriyama? If it weren’t for all these pieces of Japanese art and media that I love, would I have Genki workbooks for learning Japanese sitting on a bookshelf nestled next to Akira Toriyama’s Manga Theater? Would I be planning a Japan trip with my wife?
Probably not.
And then there are the really wild questions. If my childhood love of Dragon Ball Z never got me to dig through the early web looking for Dragon Ball Z fan sites, would I have ever made my first website when I was a kid? Would I have taught myself HTML and built a Geocities site for the home-brewed Dragon Ball Z RPG I designed as a kid? Would I have played that game with friends from middle school and other random internet people that somehow happened across that site? If it weren’t for that first, awkward step into public creation on the internet, would I have ever started freelance blogging out of college? Would I have ever gotten the chance to write for my favorite horror film podcast or have articles promoted by Sports Illustrated or ESPN? What about all the friends I’ve made through my writing over the years, would I have ever met them? Would I have any of the experiences that I’ve had with them if it weren’t in a round-about way for Dragon Ball Z and Akira Toriyama?
I’ve lived a very rich, interesting, and varied life. And in a lot of ways, I can trace a lot of that back to the art and writing of Akira Toriyama. So much of what I consider to be core to my life can all be traced back to the box art for Chrono Trigger catching my attention at Blockbuster. I never would have realized it then, but in that very moment, a butterfly flapped its wing and sent me on the path to where I am right now: sitting at my desk, looking at a figure of Goku slurping ramen, teary-eyed over the passing of Akira Toriyama and thinking about how much his art has improved my life.
Thank you, Mr. Toriyama. Your art will live on forever in the hearts and minds of the millions of people your art has touched.
The Cult Classic 
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