Why is the Devilman anime different from the manga?
Because they were built for two different audiences, on purpose, at the same time.
Devilman was commissioned as a television project: Toei Animation wanted Nagai’s Demon Lord Dante adapted with elements toned down and a more human-like anti-hero. The TV series that resulted is a superhero show. The manga was the deliberate counterweight, Nagai has said his editor told him to write an alternative take aimed at a more mature audience, and he designed it to be more horror-like than the anime from the start.
The oddity is the calendar: the “tie-in” manga began on June 11, 1972, barely a month before the anime it was supposedly supporting (July 8, 1972). The original is the manga; the anime is the adaptation that changed almost everything.
TWO AKIRA STORIES
The premise, split in twoIn the anime
Devilman is a demon of the Demon Tribe, sent to invade the human world. He kills Akira Fudo and takes his body, then falls in love with Miki Makimura and defects, fighting his own kind to protect her. A monster-of-the-week hero show.
In the manga
Akira is a living boy whose pure soul overpowers the demon Amon at the moment of fusion. He stays himself, with a demon’s strength, and the story escalates from hidden demons to open war and the end of the world.
The costume
Even the look was borrowed for television: Devilman’s outfit seems to have been inspired by a villain from the 1972 Gekko Kamen (Moonlight Mask) anime.
THE PRODUCTION
Toei · 1972–7339 episodes
The TV series ran from July 8, 1972 to April 7, 1973 on NET (today’s TV Asahi). Nagai worked on the anime’s scenario alongside screenwriter Masaki Tsuji, who wrote 35 of the 39 episodes.
Italy loved it
Broadcast in Italy in 1983, the TV Devilman enjoyed great popularity there. A DVD box set followed in Japan in 2002, and Discotek Media’s 2014 DVD was the series’ first North American license.
The OVAs went back to the manga
Devilman: The Birth (November 1, 1987) and Devilman: Demon Bird Sirène (February 25, 1990), directed by Umanosuke Iida with character designs by Kazuo Komatsubara of the TV series, adapt the manga faithfully, the Devilman the manga’s readers recognized, and the only Devilman anime commercially released in the US before 2014.