How did Devilman change manga?
It taught shōnen manga how dark it was allowed to go, and the lesson never left.
Before Devilman, a hero in a boys’ magazine did not carry a demon inside him, and a boys’ magazine did not end the world. After Devilman, both were permanently on the table. Mania Entertainment, ranking Akira Fudo among anime’s most iconic heroes, put the legacy in one sentence: shōnen manga developed a dark tone with Devilman, its theme of using evil itself to fight evil became a template the industry still draws on.
THE RECEIPTS
Creators who said soNeon Genesis Evangelion
Director Hideaki Anno has said the Evangelion Unit-01 was influenced by Devilman, Devilman’s frightening facial expressions, alongside Mazinger Z, were a basis for the mecha. (Recorded in Kodansha’s Devilman Kaitai Shinsho, 1999.)
CLAMP’s X
Manga writer Nanase Ohkawa has said Devilman was the manga that shocked her most as a child; its themes, above all the Armageddon, influenced her to write X.
The King of Fighters
A character designer at SNK admitted Devilman was an influence in designing Kyo Kusanagi, the face of The King of Fighters.
Tekken: Blood Vengeance
For the 2011 film, Jin Kazama’s demonic form was designed by Takayuki Takeya, the sculptor famous for his Devilman figures. The bloodline reaches by hand, not just by homage.
THE TEMPLATE
What Devilman normalizedEvil against evil
A hero whose power is itself monstrous, and whose humanity is the only leash on it: in 1972 that was a scandal in a boys’ magazine. It is now one of manga’s standard engines.
The apocalypse, serialized
Devilman ran the end of the world as a weekly serial years before the apocalypse became a genre of its own, the direct ancestor of a whole shelf of later dark fantasy, Berserk first among equals.