The history of Devilman
A children’s TV commission that its author turned into an anti-war warning.
Devilman began as a business arrangement. Toei Animation approached Go Nagai about adapting his 1971 manga Demon Lord Dante for television, but the producers wanted elements toned down and a more human-like anti-hero. Nagai built Devilman instead: a hero who takes a demon’s power into a human heart. The manga he drew alongside the show was something else entirely.
Kodansha serialized it in Weekly Shōnen Magazine from June 11, 1972 to June 24, 1973, barely a month ahead of the anime’s first broadcast. By March 2017 the manga had sold 50 million copies worldwide, and it has never really been out of print since. Its editions are mapped in the manga gallery.
AN ANTI-WAR MANGA
Nagai’s stated intentThe draft, as demons
Nagai designed Devilman as an anti-war work. The fusion of humans and demons is his analogy for the military draft: ordinary people seized and made into weapons.
“No justice in war”
“There is no justice in war, any war,” Nagai wrote, “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 protests
Its darkness made Devilman a major target of PTA protests in its day, and, by the same stroke, made it stand apart from every other manga of its time.
THE LONG AFTERLIFE
1973 to todayFive volumes, endless printings
The original run fits in five tankōbon, yet Kodansha has reissued it as bunko, hardcover Deluxe, three-volume and four-volume sets, an omnibus, and a Revised Edition, a publishing half-century from one year of serialization.
The screen versions
A 39-episode TV anime ran beside the manga; faithful OVAs followed in 1987 and 1990, and a modern retelling, Devilman Crybaby, in 2018. The anime and manga are famously different objects, see the comparison page in this archive.
2018: the Devilman year
Nagai’s fiftieth year as a manga author brought Crybaby on Netflix, Seven Seas’ Classic Collection hardcovers in English, and a new generation meeting Akira Fudo for the first time.