What is Shin Devilman?
Devilman’s lost years: five time-travel episodes, drawn between 1979 and 1981, that later editions absorbed into the saga itself.
Shin Devilman (“New Devilman”) ran in Kodansha’s Shōnen Magazine Special across five installments, May 1979 to May 1981. All of it was drawn by Go Nagai; the first chapter was written with Masaki Tsuji, the TV series’ chief writer, and the next two with Hiroshi Koenji. Its premise is a tour: Akira and Ryo travel through time, meeting the demons hiding inside human history.
THE EPISODES AND THEIR FATE
1979 to todayJoan of Arc, first
The most famous stop on the tour is Joan of Arc’s France. When the Deluxe Edition folded Shin Devilman into the main volumes in 1987, it rearranged the episodes to place the Joan of Arc story first, and trimmed dialogue that spoiled the original manga’s ending.
The wordless one-shot
Compiled with Shin Devilman in every edition is a separate 16-page story with no text at all, first published in Kadokawa’s Variety magazine: Akira alone after Miki’s death, in the quiet before the final battle. It is the most silent sixteen pages in the whole Devilman shelf.
Absorbed, then trimmed
From 1987 onward Shin Devilman lives inside the main run (it opens volume 3 of the Deluxe text) rather than beside it. The 2012 Revised Edition is the exception: it drops two of its episodes, Nike and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
In English, badly
Shin Devilman’s one standalone English edition is notorious: Verotik’s colored American version of 1995, which Nagai saw at San Diego Comic-Con and disliked, and which ended after three issues. The full story is on this archive’s English editions page.