Go Nagai

• 1. Introduction

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  Go Nagai was born on the 6th of September 1945 in Wajima, a city in Ishikawa Prefecture, just as Japan was emerging from the wreckage of the Second World War. His family had only just returned from Shanghai. Within a few years, his father died, and his mother moved him and his four brothers to Tokyo. It was a childhood shaped by displacement and loss, and yet it produced one of the most influential figures in the history of manga. Nagai would go on to create or help pioneer not one genre but several: the super robot, the magical girl, the post-apocalyptic story, and modern erotic manga. How does a child shaped by Gustave Dore's illustrations of the Divine Comedy end up changing the entire landscape of Japanese popular culture? And what was it about a bout of illness in a prep school that set the whole machine in motion?

• 2. The Turning Point

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  While studying at a prep school in hopes of earning placement at Waseda University, Nagai suffered a severe case of diarrhea that lasted three weeks. Convinced he was facing his own death, he decided he wanted to leave some evidence that he had existed. The thing he wanted to do, the thing he had loved as a child, was manga. He resolved to produce at least one work in what he believed were his final months. He went to the hospital, received a diagnosis of catarrh of the colon, and recovered. But the experience had already changed him. He stopped attending school after three months and committed himself to manga as a way of life.

  His mother actively opposed this direction. It is said that when the young Nagai submitted work to publishers, she secretly contacted those same publishers and urged them to reject him. Despite the rejections accumulating, his work caught the eye of Weekly Shonen Sunday, which put him in contact with the celebrated manga artist Shotaro Ishinomori. With the help of his brother Yasutaka, Nagai had produced a trial manga about a science fiction ninja. It began at fifteen or sixteen pages and grew to eighty-eight pages over a year. Ishinomori praised the work but noted the design was too chunky. A few days later, Nagai was invited to join Ishinomori's studio as an assistant. He was nineteen years old. The trial manga itself was set aside and not published until 2007, when it appeared in a magazine under a new name.

• 3. Harenchi Gakuen and the Culture Wars

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  In 1968, Shueisha was preparing to launch a new manga publication called Shonen Jump to compete with established rivals. Nagai was invited to be among the first artists to publish in it. The series he produced was Harenchi Gakuen, a school-themed manga that introduced overt eroticism to children's comics for the first time in Japan. Less than a year after his professional debut, he had his first major success. The series caused Shonen Jump to sell more than one million copies and is considered probably the single most influential manga work at the end of the 1960s.

  The backlash was intense. Parents, women's associations, and PTAs protested loudly. The PTA managed to block distribution of the magazine in some parts of Japan. Nagai was called a nuisance and branded an enemy of society. Whenever he traveled outside Tokyo, TV cameras were waiting for him. His fans wrote him letters pointing out that the adults denouncing the manga were consuming far racier material themselves.

  Nagai never drew sex scenes and avoided depictions of genitals in the early run, though the manga did include male nudity throughout. He was aware of the standards applied to material aimed at audiences under eighteen. When the series faced cancellation because of the protests, Nagai responded by transforming Harenchi Gakuen into something darker: a full-scale war story in which all the students and teachers, defending their freedom of expression, are killed by the PTA and parental forces. It was his ironic reply to his critics. The series subsequently returned to publication for several more years. The controversy also directly produced two new series: Abashiri Ikka, begun in 1969, and a second school-based war satire, both of which became popular works in Nagai's juvenile period.

  Dynamic Productions, founded with his brothers in April 1969, was a direct consequence of the Harenchi Gakuen experience. Because Nagai had derived almost no royalties from the TV series, films, and merchandise tied to that manga, the new company was set up to manage his contractual rights. It became one of the first companies in the manga industry to require publishers to sign formal contracts, at a time when most agreements were still verbal. It began as a yugen gaisha and converted to a kabushiki gaisha in 1970.

• 4. Robots and Demons

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  Ken Ishikawa joined Dynamic Productions in the same year it was founded, becoming Nagai's second assistant after Mitsuru Hiruta. He would grow into one of Nagai's closest creative partners and his best friend. In 1972, working across multiple publications simultaneously, Nagai achieved something only matched by Shinji Mizushima and George Akiyama: he wrote and drew five weekly manga series at the same time.

  Two of those series became the work Nagai himself considers his life's achievement. Mazinger Z introduced the concept of a giant robot piloted by a human from within a cockpit, a design logic that had never appeared in manga before. It is credited with creating the super robot genre and spawned a long chain of sequels, including Great Mazinger, Grendizer, and Mazinkaiser. In Spain, a statue of Mazinger Z was erected in Tarragona. Grendizer became enormously popular in Italy, France, and the Middle East.

  Running simultaneously with Mazinger, Devilman told the story of a demonic hero battling hordes of demons. The manga and its accompanying TV anime were conceived for entirely different audiences and became very different stories as a result. The anime was aimed at elementary school children; the manga, published in a shonen magazine for teenagers, allowed Nagai to incorporate violence, nudity, and darker themes that connected it back to his earlier horror work on Demon Lord Dante. Nagai had stated in his autobiographical manga Gekiman! that his real aspiration had always been serious science fiction, and Devilman gave him the opening to break free of the gag manga expectations that editors had placed on him.

• 5. Influence and Legacy

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  Director Hideaki Anno cited both Devilman and Mazinger as sources of inspiration for Neon Genesis Evangelion, in a conversation with Nagai that was published in Devilman Tabulae Anatomicae in 1999. Anno later directed a theatrical adaptation of Cutie Honey and a three-part OVA series, both released in 2004, and Nagai appeared in the film as a cameo.

  Manga artist Kentaro Miura, the creator of Berserk, said in an interview included with the fourth volume of a North American DVD release in 2002 that Nagai had a significant influence on his dynamic style. Novelist and anime screenwriter Gen Urobuchi has said that Devilman was the work that made him understand that bittersweet endings are the best kind. Scriptwriter Kazuki Nakashima recalled reading everything by Nagai from his debut and said that Devilman, which he encountered in middle school, made him feel he was maturing alongside the writer himself. Goichi Suda, the video game designer and director, named Violence Jack and Susano Oh as his favorite manga.

  Approximately seventy-five series inspired by Devilman were listed on a poster and website produced as advertising for Devilman Crybaby. That list included Parasyte, Tokyo Ghoul, Attack on Titan, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Berserk. Yu-Gi-Oh! creator Kazuki Takahashi separately stated that Devilman was one of the characters he drew most as a child. Tatsuki Fujimoto's Chainsaw Man is among the works inspired by the story that postdate the site's creation.

  Violence Jack, the post-Devilman series about a giant man fighting for survival in a Japan destroyed by a massive earthquake, is credited with creating the post-apocalyptic manga and anime genre. Its desert wasteland, with biker gangs, ruined buildings, and small abandoned villages, may have shaped the settings of the Australian film series Mad Max, which debuted in 1979, and the Japanese manga and anime Fist of the North Star, which began in 1983. Cutie Honey is credited with helping pioneer the magical girl genre, with particular influence on Sailor Moon. In 1980, Nagai received the 4th Kodansha Manga Award for shonen for Susano OH. In 2005, he became a Character Design professor at the Osaka University of Arts. The Go Nagai Wonderland Museum opened in 2009 in Wajima, his birthplace, but burned down following the 2024 Sea of Japan earthquake. In 2025, Nagai received the Order of the Rising Sun, 4th Class, Gold Rays with Rosette.