6-26-2026

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This is Aside Manga News for June 26th, 2026.

Last week on X, previously known as Twitter,  A Japanese Akira Toriyama fan acquired a unique item. This was a hand written letter and illustration from Daimuro Kishi to Akira Toriyama. While we can’t prove it’s authenticity, this is very a likely real item that is rarely seen between mangaka. The exact contents of the letter have been blurred for their privacy, but the tale between these two creators does tell an interesting story.

Daimuro Kishi first began his mangaka career with a series of oneshots between 1983 and 1987 for Shueisha. This includes being the runner up for the 26th Tezuka Award and winning the 29th Tezuka Award. This led to his first serialization, Kyoryu Daikiko, in Weekly Shonen Jump. Starting in issue 51 in 1988, it ended a short while later in issue 12 of 1989. For being a short series, it only had a single volume release in May 1989. It later got a reprint in 1993 as Weekly Shonen Jump magazine was celebrating it’s 25th anniversary and highlighting some of their legacy titles.

However as part of the 30th anniversary, when interviewing various mangakas, Akira Toriyama highlighted the Kyoryu Daikiko series as his number 1 Jump series recommendation. He commented at the time that it was the only manga series he read every week in the magazine. During that time the series was being printed, Toriyama was publishing his Dragonball manga in the same magazine. In particular, this is when the series moved into the Dragonball Z portion of the story with chapters 201 through 212 being published. On Manga Properties, we have this original interview with a rough English translation, if you are interested in Toriyama’s comments and other Jump series recommendations. A link to article is included in our sources on our website.

This author comment then boosted the popularity and awareness of the series, which then got new editions printed in 2005. The new edition contained a new comment directly from Akira Toriyama expanding on why he enjoyed the series so much. This volume also updated some of the factual inaccuracies related to dinosaurs that had been discovered since its original printing.

This color edition was then published as an English eBook in 2017 on Amazon Kindle. The eBook is still available under the title DINOVENTURE – Stories of Dinosaurs and can be read for free as part of Kindle Unlimited.

In 2018 another edition of the manga was published in Japan. This edition then removed all of the updates from the previous editions and presents the story as it was first printed in the Weekly Shonen Jump magazine with original color and bichrome color pages intact. It also includes some additional author comments from Daimuro Kishi.

Looping back to that post on X, it does appears likely that this is an authentic message written from Daimuro Kishi to Akira Toriyama. Kishi’s illustration, dated August 16th, 2005, would be shortly after the newer manga edition was printed. While we don’t know the exact content of the letter, he’s likely thanking Toriyama for his comments that were included in this edition which helped the sales and popularity for the series.

As this letter was stuck in the manga volume, which otherwise didn’t have any special markings, it’s possible that this item was just accidently lost after Toriyama received it. Potentially he lent this item out to a friend, or was misplaced with other volumes of manga he may have owned. The exact scenario will never be known. But as fans from around the world are inspired by Akira Toriyama’s works to this day, he also inspired by his fellow mangaka too.