Violence Jack

• 1. Introduction

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  Violence Jack arrived in Weekly Shonen Magazine on the 22nd of July, 1973, and it arrived with a figure unlike anything manga readers had encountered. Seven to ten feet tall, with the muscles of a gorilla, the fangs of a wolf, and burning primordial eyes, the character named himself after a large foldout jackknife. He appeared out of nowhere in the ruins of a devastated Kanto region following a catastrophe called the Great Kanto Hellquake, and then, just as suddenly, he would vanish without a trace.

  The manga was written and illustrated by Go Nagai, and it ran with gaps and restarts across an extraordinary span of time, concluding in 1990. Along the way it accumulated roughly 38 tankobon volumes, spawned three original video animations, and attracted a cluster of devoted and troubled censorship battles in multiple countries. Violence Jack is formally credited with introducing the post-apocalyptic genre to manga and anime. What that means, and how it happened, is a story that reaches from a sadistic warlord born into iron armor to Goichi Suda standing in a desert and thinking about everything that came from this one strange, violent comic.

• 2. A World After the Hellquake

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  The Kanto region in Violence Jack is not simply ruined. It is severed. Cut off from the rest of Japan after the Great Kanto Hellquake, it becomes a landscape where the survivors divide themselves between the strong and the weak, and where criminals and renegades from around the world pour in to fill the vacuum. The ruins of cities become hunting grounds. Roving tribes prey on isolated settlements. Small abandoned villages dot a wasteland that no outside authority can reach.

  In the OVAs, the trigger for this catastrophe is a comet strike rather than a purely natural disaster. Volcanoes erupt, earthquakes follow, cities collapse. An underground section of Tokyo is sealed from the surface entirely in Evil Town, its trapped residents surviving for several months in a place they name Hell City. Hope Town, in the third OVA Hell's Wind, represents a deliberate attempt to build something peaceful in this environment, and it is promptly ransacked by the biker gang Hell's Wind.

  The specifics of how the wasteland is organized matter. It is divided not just by violence but by social structure, however grotesque. In Hell City there are three sections: Section A, run by businessmen and policed by officers; Section B, controlled by the gang leader Mad Saurus; and Section C, a former modeling agency. These groupings replicate the hierarchies and failures of the old world in miniature. The revelation that Section A's leaders, after the earthquake, ran wild and participated in assault before restoring order gives the post-apocalyptic setting a political edge that goes beyond simple brutality.

• 3. Jack and the Warlords

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  Jack's relationship with power in Kanto is never straightforward. He helps the weak, but he expects nothing in return, and his unpredictable fighting style means bystanders are injured or killed as a side effect of his protection. In one arc he even enters the body of a boy living in a tropical forest to fight off a roving tribe of bandits. He is, as the series acknowledges, a complete mystery to those who encounter him.

  The main antagonist of the central arc is a figure called Slum King, whose backstory is one of the stranger origin stories in manga. Born as Takatora Doma, the oldest son of the Doma family from Shinshu, he carries a rare and potentially fatal condition that accelerates the growth of muscle tissue. His family's response is to encase him in heavy samurai armor and an iron mask, then lock him away in a shed. A private tutor later teaches him to read and write, and a subsequent series of events, including discovering his brother and the tutor together, ends with Doma murdering his entire family and disappearing. Decades later, the Great Kanto Hellquake creates the landscape in which Doma becomes Slum King.

  Slum King's method of punishment is specific and deliberate. Those who anger him have their arms and legs cut off to the joints and their tongues removed. He is one of the very few figures in Kanto capable of going directly against Jack and surviving. After their first confrontation, he orders his army to scour the wasteland for his enemy, and his presence returns at the close of Hell's Wind, his eyes filling the screen as the credits begin.

• 4. The Devilman Connection

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  From the beginning, Violence Jack contained hints about its relationship to Go Nagai's earlier manga Devilman. The final chapter resolves those hints completely. The post-apocalyptic world of Violence Jack is, in its culminating revelation, a world re-created by God. Satan, identified as Ryo Asuka, is punished within it by being constantly humiliated by Slum King, who is the reincarnation of Zennon, Satan's own second-in-command. As part of this punishment, Ryo has had all four limbs removed and is forced to walk on the stumps.

  Jack is Akira Fudo, one of three parts of Devilman. A child Jack and a woman Jack, ordinarily visible as birds near the main figure, are the other two parts. When Ryo regains his memories and identity as Satan, he leads demons into battle alongside Zennon to resume the fight against Devilman. This time, Devilman wins.

  Shin Violence Jack, a reboot, reconfigures this mythology entirely. In that continuity, Jack is instead the demon Amon, while Akira Fudo appears as an amnesiac warlord known as the Skull King. Jinmen, the iconic Devilman demon, serves as Skull King's chief subordinate. A reborn Sirene merges with a character named Sara to become a Devilman-type being, and the story follows Jack's effort to restore Akira's memories. The CB Chara Nagai Go World OVA, a comedic spin-off series, dedicates its third episode to the Violence Jack saga and confirms the original Jack-as-Akira-Fudo identification explicitly.

• 5. Serialization Across Decades

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  Few manga have accumulated a publication history as fragmented as Violence Jack. The first serialization ran from the 22nd of July, 1973, to the 29th of September, 1974, in Weekly Shonen Magazine, published by Kodansha. A second run followed in the same publisher's Monthly Shonen Magazine from July 1977 to December 1978. Together, these two Kodansha serializations originally filled seven volumes.

  Five years after that second run ended, the manga resumed in an entirely different magazine. Weekly Manga Goraku, published by Nihon Bungeisha, carried the series from the 5th of August, 1983, to the 23rd of March, 1990, producing 31 volumes. On the 1st of November, 1993, Nihon Bungeisha released a special tankobon. Then, on the 10th of December, 2001, Shueisha published a one-shot story in Bessatsu Young Jump number 14, a special edition of Weekly Young Jump. That story was later reprinted in GOGASHA, a two-volume compilation released in 2017.

  In May 2005, Weekly Comic Bunch published by Shinchosha began the most recent serialization, which published irregularly, paused on the 19th of August, 2005, restarted on the 2nd of November, 2007, and ended on the 11th of April, 2008. Media Factory compiled that run into two volumes in 2010. As recently as February 2021, Kodansha's Monthly Young Magazine announced a new manga series by Yu Kinutani set in the Violence Jack world, which began on the 19th of February, 2021, finished on the 21st of November, 2022, and as of September 2022 had been collected into three tankobon volumes.

• 6. The OVAs and Their Censors

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  Three OVAs were produced from selected manga arcs, released in June 1986, on the 21st of December, 1988, and on the 9th of November, 1990. The first, known in some translations as Harlem Bomber, depicts the encounter between Jack and Slum King and the rescue of a young woman named Mari by her boyfriend Ken'ichi. Ken'ichi dies during Jack's fight with Harem Bomber, killed accidentally when Jack swings a helicopter into his opponent. The final image of this OVA is Jack transforming into a gigantic golden bird, with Mari following on foot.

  Evil Town was the second OVA and the most contentious. When Manga Entertainment submitted it to the Australian Classification Board in 1997, it was refused a rating. The version submitted appears to have been the already-censored UK cut, which ran 55 minutes against the original's 60 minutes. Because Evil Town was refused classification, the planned releases of the remaining OVAs in Australia were scrapped.

  In the United Kingdom, Manga Entertainment's release of Evil Town carried 30 cuts from an already edited version, totaling 4 minutes and 25 seconds removed. Hell's Wind lost 6 minutes and 43 seconds, and the first OVA lost 25 seconds. The cuts were related to sex, violence, bondage, and cannibalism. The US version received similar cuts. Right Stuf later arranged with Manga Entertainment to release an unedited US version in November 1996, creating a new label, Critical Mass, specifically because the content was considered too intense for the regular Right Stuf line. The Critical Mass release offered both dubbed and subtitled formats, unlike the censored Manga Entertainment version, which was dubbed only. In New Zealand, where Manga Entertainment released the OVAs, the marketing promoted them as the version banned in Australia. Discotek Media released the full uncut series in 2015. In France and Italy, uncut versions were released in 1999 and 2003 respectively, by Manga Entertainment and Fox Pathe Europa in France, and by Shin Vision in Italy.

• 7. Legacy and Influence

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  Goichi Suda, known as Suda 51, whose video game series No More Heroes debuted in 2007, stated plainly about desert-setting post-apocalyptic works: "All of the desert-setting titles are actually inspired by Violence Jack. That came way before Hokuto no Ken, so that's the real origin of everything. It's a great Japanese comic."

  The elements that Violence Jack put on the page, biker gangs, anarchic violence, ruined buildings, tribal chiefs, small abandoned villages in a desert wasteland, are recognizable in the Australian film series Mad Max, which debuted in 1979, and in the Japanese manga and anime series Fist of the North Star, which debuted in 1983. Both came after Violence Jack began in 1973, and the manga's setting may have influenced them.

  Kentaro Miura, creator of Berserk, which began in 1989, cited Violence Jack as an influence. The original video animation M.D. Geist from 1986 is listed among Japanese works influenced by the manga. The Atlus video game series Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei II, debuting in 1990, also falls within that sphere of influence. Two novels with illustrations by Go Nagai were published by Kadokawa Shoten in August 1986 and April 1987, written by Yasutaka Nagai. A third novel written by Tatsuhiko Dan with Go Nagai's illustrations followed in July 1995 from Kodansha, extending the work's reach into yet another medium. The Yu Kinutani manga series announced in 2021 continued that extension into the present century.