The 38th entry in the official Japanese Dragon Ball website’s “The Nearly Complete Works of Akira Toriyama” was a quick look at the inside title page from 1988’s Akira Toriyama’s _____piece Theatre Vol. 2. While this is a nice glimpse at the book, it does not nearly begin to cover the breadth of new commentary from Toriyama himself!

In between the various one-shots collected in the volume (itself released during the 23rd Tenka’ichi Budōkai in Dragon Ball‘s serialization), Toriyama contributed a six-part “This is How I Became a Cartoonist” illustrated series. We have heard the story of Kazuhiko Torishima discovering and encouraging Toriyama countless times, but in this case Toriyama gets a little more introspective and reflects on his school days and brief time in the traditional workforce:

I was one of the more talented ones at the design firm I joined, so I conducted my work pretty shrewdly. Except I wasn’t a morning person, so I was quite frequently late for work. On top of that, it was a fairly big company, they were fussy about the dress code, and I got chewed out quite often. In short, I had problems as a member of the workforce. In the end, I came to hate my job, and I quit after about two and a half years. But looking back on it now, I came to know at least a little bit of how the world works, so it wasn’t a waste. If one were to go straight from the student to the cartoonist, that sort of thing would be hard to understand, no matter what.

This series has been archived in our “Translations” section.