Devilman

• 1. Introduction

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  Devilman is the manga series by Go Nagai that sent a 16-year-old reader named Nanase Ohkawa into a state of shock she never forgot, and eventually led her to write her own apocalyptic manga, X, decades later. That kind of reach is rare. What Nagai put on the page starting in June 1972 was not a conventional superhero story. It was a warning. A shy high school student named Akira Fudo absorbs a demon's power during a ritual called the Black Sabbath, fights monsters hidden inside ordinary people, and watches the world tear itself apart anyway. The manga sold over 50 million copies worldwide. It provoked protests from parent groups. And it quietly shaped the DNA of some of the most celebrated anime and manga that followed. How did a work this dark, ordered by a television studio that wanted something toned down, end up going further than almost anything of its time? That question pulls us through the next hour.

• 2. Born from Compromise

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  Toei Animation approached Go Nagai with a specific request: take his manga Demon Lord Dante and convert it into a television series, but with certain elements softened and a more human-like anti-hero at the center. What emerged from that negotiation was something neither party fully predicted. Devilman's 39-episode anime series launched on NET, the network now known as TV Asahi, on the 8th of July 1972. But Nagai had no intention of letting the television version be his only statement on the subject. Barely a month before the anime aired, he began a serialized manga in Kodansha's Weekly Shonen Magazine. He told his editor the manga would serve as an alternative take aimed at a more mature audience. The two versions share a character and a premise but diverge sharply in tone. Nagai designed the outfit for his title character with a nod to a villain from the 1972 Gekko Kamen anime, but everything underneath the costume pointed somewhere darker. He worked on the anime scenario alongside screenwriter and science-fiction novelist Masaki Tsuji, who wrote the scripts for 35 of the series' 39 episodes. By the time the manga finished its run in June 1973, it had become something its television origins could not contain.

• 3. The Demon Inside the Draft

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  Nagai wrote openly about what Devilman was actually for. The fusion of a human and a demon was his analogy for the military draft. Miki's violent death, one of the story's most brutal turning points, was meant to represent the death of peace. He stated plainly: "There is no justice in war, any war, nor is there any justification for human beings killing one another. Devilman carries a message of warning, as we step toward a bright future." The manga's central twist, in which Ryo Asuka is revealed to be Satan, a fallen angel who had his own memories erased and replaced with a human identity, extends that anti-war logic into theology. Nagai argued that Satan was not a stereotypical villain. He believed God fit that category more accurately, given what God had done to demons before the story even began. The final sequence of the manga makes the point without mercy. Twenty years after the demons and humans begin their war, all humans are dead except the Devilmen Akira has recruited. In the last battle, both the Devilmen and the demons are wiped out. Satan mortally wounds Akira and then realizes, too late, that his own actions against humanity were no different from God's actions against demons. God's angels descend on a ruined Earth as Satan grieves.

• 4. A Franchise Takes Shape

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  The manga ran from the 11th of June 1972 to the 24th of June 1973 in Weekly Shonen Magazine. Kodansha collected it into tankōbon volumes multiple times over the following decades. Starting with the 1987 printing, most Kodansha editions included Shin Devilman, a connected work that was not originally intended to be part of the canon. Seven Seas Entertainment brought out an English translation of the original manga in two volumes in 2018. The franchise built outward steadily. Two OVAs were released in the late 1980s and early 1990s: the first by King Records on the 1st of November 1987, and the second by Bandai Visual on the 25th of February 1990. Both were directed by Umanosuke Iida and closely developed in conjunction with Nagai. Kazuo Komatsubara, who had been an animation director on the original television series, served as character designer for both. The OVAs followed the manga's plot through Akira's battle with Sirene and made only minor changes. They were the only Devilman anime commercially released in the United States before 2014, when Discotek Media licensed the television series for DVD. A crossover animated film with the Cyborg 009 franchise arrived in 2015. Then, on the 5th of January 2018, Netflix released Devilman Crybaby worldwide, a 10-episode original net animation produced by Science Saru and directed by Masaaki Yuasa, offering an alternate and more modern retelling of the original manga.

• 5. What Critics Found

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  Reception to Devilman was never simple. The controversial themes in the story's early chapters, before Akira even becomes Devilman, drew the first rounds of critical attention. Reviewers noted the homoerotic tension in Akira and Ryo's relationship as an element that made the work more interesting to read. The moment Miki dies was described by one critic at Anime News Network, Jason Thompson, as looking like a visualization of a child's nightmare. The scholar Masanao Amano compared the scene in which humans begin killing other humans to witch-hunting, and found it a genuine shock not only to readers but to the next generation of manga artists. Thompson was harder on Nagai's draftsmanship, writing that the characters' eyes rarely seem to point in the same direction and that the women resemble blow-up dolls with apples glued to their chests. That particular strain of criticism did not stop readers. Mania Entertainment ranked Devilman fifth on its list of 10 Most Iconic Anime Heroes. The writer Thomas Zoth noted that Devilman was the point where shonen manga acquired a dark tone, through its graphic violence, casual blasphemy, and the theme of using evil itself to fight evil. Parent groups and PTAs repeatedly targeted the series for protest over its violence. By March 2017, more than 50 million copies were in circulation. In 2018, Anime News Network placed the manga among its seven best new manga for grown-ups.

• 6. Afterlives in Other Works

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  Nagai continued to pull Akira Fudo and his companions into other projects long after the original series ended. Miki Makimura became the first female protagonist of the 1974 manga Oira Sukeban. Akira appeared across multiple incarnations of Cutie Honey, most notably the 1994 OVA New Cutie Honey. In the Violence Jack manga, Miki and Ryo Asuka appear as figures with dog bodies and human heads. The 1991 OVA CB Chara Nagai Go World crossed the Devilman cast with characters from Mazinger Z and Violence Jack in a comedic super-deformed format. That release made explicit what had been implicit: Violence Jack is revealed to be a future version of Akira Fudo. Go Nagai published a long-running spin-off called Devilman Saga in Shogakukan's Big Comic from the 25th of December 2014 to the 10th of March 2020. The story moves forward to the year 2025 and follows a roboticist named Fudou Yuuki who joins a project involving a mural depicting humanity's true past and ancient technology found in Antarctica. Outside Nagai's own work, the influence ran deeper than cameos. A character designer at SNK acknowledged that Devilman informed the design of Kyo Kusanagi. Hideaki Anno stated that the mecha Evangelion Unit 01 was shaped by Devilman's disturbing facial expressions, alongside Mazinger Z. For the 2011 film Tekken: Blood Vengeance, designer Takayuki Takeya, known for his work on both Devilman and Kamen Rider, gave Jin Kazama a demonic transformation.