What are the Devilman English editions?
Devilman waited forty-six years for a complete, proper English edition, and nearly got three false starts first.
For a manga that sold 50 million copies, Devilman’s English history is a comedy of near-misses: a publisher’s own one-volume experiment in 1986, a colored edition its author disowned in 1995, and a bilingual set in 2002 that was built for Japanese students, not Western readers. The real arrival came in 2018, when Seven Seas published the whole manga in two hardcover omnibuses, the same year Crybaby put Devilman on every screen on Earth.
THE FALSE STARTS
1986–20031986 · The Devil’s Incarnation
Dynamic Production’s own American shot: Go Nagai’s Devilman: The Devil’s Incarnation, chapters from the first tankōbon translated by Willard Carroll with David Lewis. It sold poorly and vanished, for years it was the only English Devilman that existed.
1995 · Verotik’s Shin Devilman
Glenn Danzig’s Verotik published Shin Devilman as a colored American comic. Nagai, Verotik’s guest at the 1995 San Diego Comic-Con, saw the book there and was not pleased; the colorist changed with issue #3, and the series ended with it.
2002–03 · Kodansha Bilingual Comics
Five volumes based on the Deluxe text (ISBNs 4770027850–4770027893): English inside the word balloons, Japanese in the margins, an edition built for Japanese readers learning English, which Western collectors adopted by default. Its translation stopped being the only option in 2018.
THE ARRIVAL
Seven Seas · 2017–18The Classic Collection
Two hardcover omnibuses (May 22 and November 13, 2018), 680 pages each, $29.99 cover price, translated by Zack Davisson, the complete original manga in English at last, based on the Deluxe Edition text. The covers are in this archive’s gallery.
The same wave
Seven Seas surrounded it with the modern spinoffs: Devilman G (from October 2017) and Devilman vs. Hades (from February 2018), both also translated by Davisson, Devilman’s whole modern shelf, in English, inside eighteen months.