I've already posted about this on my Tumblr page dedicated to archiving all 80s and 90s vintage promotional art for the original run of the Dragon Ball/Z/GT anime series (which yes, I've just gotten back to now updating after some years away from it), so I'll just repost here what I've already said on this topic over there:
Not much more to add beyond what I said there, save to say that I think that artists like Furusawa are every bit as much an important piece of Dragon Ball's visual legacy and iconography as both Toriyama and the animators over at Toei and whatnot. Personally, this hits me in a similar way that Shunsuke Kikuchi's passing did: a super crucial piece of the series' original presentation is now (as of last year) gone.Early last year Jun’ya Furusawa passed away. I’m sure even most of the die hard DB fans who are reading this might be wondering “Who the hell is Jun’ya Furusawa?”
You very well may not know his name, but you CERTAINLY know his artwork for the series. In fact, a VAST chunk of it makes up a huge, *huge* selection of this blog’s images!
There’s frustratingly little biographical information about him that’s out there. Hell, I couldn’t even find an actual date of birth on the guy for this post! But from what information is available: Jun’ya Furusawa’s relationship with Dragon Ball started out sometime in the early to mid 1980s, when he was simply a college student and fan of the series.
A talented artist himself who was able to almost seamlessly mimic Akira Toriyama’s signature style, he had drawn numerous pieces of fan art and Doujinshi (fan manga) for Dragon Ball that he’d submitted to numerous anime magazines (under the pen name “Furujun”).
Before long, his work caught the attention of Bird Studios, who hired him on to be one of Dragon Ball’s numerous official promotional artists, a position he held for the latter parts of original Dragon Ball’s run, and the entirety of Dragon Ball Z’s run.
During this time, Furusawa had drawn an absolute TON of the Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z anime’s promotional art pieces that were used on literally *countless* posters, wallscrolls, calendars, shitajiki (pencil boards, which were very popular forms of merchandise for anime and manga throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s), trading cards, video game and toy box art, magazine ads, and so on.
Early last year in 2020, evidently Furusawa had left on some sort of sailing trip aboard a small ship, but went missing and his body has to date not been found. He was declared legally dead on May 1st 2020.
Again I cannot overstate this: it is absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to have been a fan of Dragon Ball for ANY length of time and to have NOT seen much of Furusawa’s artwork, many of which have gone on to become flat out iconic images that most of us associate with the series. If you’re on this blog, you’ll see TONS of his work plastered all throughout here.
Its not at all an exaggeration to say that Jun’ya Furusawa’s Dragon Ball promotional artwork is just as much the “face” of the series in its classic run as Toriyama’s own artwork was.
Even well after Furusawa had finished his professional relationship with Dragon Ball as its official promotional artist (sometime around the start of Dragon Ball GT I believe), he remained a fan throughout the rest of his life, and continued drawing fan art and various pieces of Dragon Ball art on his own time for his own enjoyment.
By all accounts, he was a VERY enthusiastic fan of the series, its characters, and the whole Dragon World, and his palpable love for Dragon Ball very much shined through in most of his pieces.
From what I can gather, evidently Furusawa was also a massive fan of the non-Saiyan characters (Tenshinhan, Yamucha, Chaozu, Kuririn, etc) and their continued presence in much of the latter bulk of Z’s promotional art was evidently at least in some part due to his own insistence on continuing to draw them, even well after they had drifted into becoming more ancillary characters.
Unfortunately, anime promotional artists are so rarely ever properly credited, so it is exceedingly hard to narrow down exactly who did which piece of promotional art: Furusawa did however release an art book containing the sketch material for much of his work for the series throughout the 80s and 90s sometime around 2015 I think (or thereabouts), so that at least helps narrow down some significant chunk of which promo works are his.
It’ll be a long, painstaking process, but at some point I do intend to go back through this blog’s archives and retroactively add Furusawa’s name to each piece that’s his (as I would also like to be able to do to every other classic 80s and 90s Dragon Ball promo art piece posted here, were it at all possible to narrow them all down).
For the time being though, even if its more than a year late, I just wanted to dedicate a post in this blog - which is dedicated with immense amounts of love and respect to SO MUCH of his work, as well as that of the countless other often uncredited Dragon Ball promotional artists - to the man who’s art and passion for this series had come to define Dragon Ball’s image almost as much as that of its creator, Akira Toriyama throughout the vast bulk of its original 1980s and 1990s Japanese run.
Anyone reading this blog who happens to know when Furusawa’s birthday actually is, feel free to DM it to me, and I’ll add it into this post.
RIP
Jun’ya “Furujun” Furusawa
??/??/???? - 5/1/2020
I personally find Furusawa's artwork to be amazingly well done and supremely underrated, with a distinct pull and vividness all its own, and I think its had a VERY important, positive impact on helping Dragon Ball grow and expand its reach beyond Japan and over into foreign/English territories: including here in North America in the years before the FUNimation dub. A great many fans even that far back probably saw and got drawn into the series originally by a piece of art from the likes of Furusawa before they even did one from Toriyama himself (I'm fairly sure I was probably in that boat myself).
Many of us understandably mourned the passing of Kikuchi recently, but I didn't want this notable death among the original Dragon Ball anime's creative team to continue flying under the radar to the extent that it has for the past year now.
She/Her 
