illusioncity.net

Devilman

DEVILMAN

Index

Part I: Introduction; History, plot and a general review (no spoilers)

Part II: Comment and Interpretation (spoilers)

Part III: Other appearances in mangas and videogames

INTRODUCTION

I’m very pleased to begin the comic/manga section of the site with an article on Devilman…certainly my favourite comic ever.

I came across it a long time ago, and it immediately struck me deeply. At that time I couldn’t understand all of it, but the strong emotion and fascination I felt nested inside me and grew inside me over the years. When I read it again during the years, bit after bit a picture formed. I finally could rationalise and put into words the strange emotions and feelings that I’ve already felt in the past.

Very few comics struck me so deeply…among others (for example Moore’s V for Vendetta and Tezuka’s Blackjack and Buddha) are all masterpieces in the same league as Devilman.

Therefore, it’s appropriate to me to inaugurate this section with a big article on the devilman…I hope you will enjoy it.

 

HISTORY, PLOT AND A GENERAL REVIEW (NO SPOILERS)

Devilman was written by the Japanese author Go Nagai in 1972, shortly after the demise of Mao Dante, which was closed abruptly because of it’s extreme and shocking content in 1971.
Devilman picks a lot of themes from Mao Dante, but it develops them in a very different way and with a different perspective. As Nagai himself tells, Devilman started as a project for an anime serie (which was indeed created and had a 39 episodes run), heavily inspired from the tokusatsu (Japanese super heroes, like the infamous Kamen Rider or Ultraman). Nagai worked at the same time on the anime serie and on the manga, but the two projects were very different from the start, in all the aspects: plot, mood, style, objectives.
Nagai in his memories recalls that writing Devilman was a very exausting work, a work which absorbed him fully and in some way made him work in a sort of trance-like state. It’s not hard to believe him: Devilman is a very intense work, and this intensity oozes both in the story and in the realization: the graphic style is nervous, expressionist-like, essential but rich in emotional overtones: visage are molded by the fire of the emotions; anathomies are situated in a strange world between the human and the demonic one; shadows and lights dance and mix themselves in a swirling, and extremely fascinating chaos. This is probably the best graphic work of the early Go Nagai. The plot, on the other hand, has a spiral-like pattern: it starts out pretty “normal” (if this word is suitable to any of the Nagai’s works) only to slowly sink deeper and deeper into the macabre, the bizzarre, the absurd and then, once there, it starts spinning faster and faster, forcing the reader to follow it’s strange tides, until the very center of the spiral of chaos. The descent into the realms of the irrational can be found in more or less all the best works by Nagai, but Deviman maybe is the one in which this works better and it’s more spontaneous. Nagai in his memories recalls that he himself often didn’t know how the situations would turn later and he states that he didn’t knew fully about the demise of his characters while writing Devilman.

I’ve collected the part of Nagai memories (in the form of nice comic pages) regarding Devilman here on the site. Check the third section of the article (other appaerances) to find the download link.Be careful, because they are full of spoilers, so I suggest reading them after having read the manga.

Having said that, let’s examine a bit of the main plot. The comic revolves around Akira Fudo, a shy and kind-hearted high school student. He is a good guy, but he is also pretty weak: he refuses conflicts and violence on a level so deep that he finds himself to be a victim of conflicts and violence, thus paradoxically failing in his effort of avoiding them because of his very own avoidance. One day, his best friend, Ryo Asuka, a blond and cool guy wearing a trench, summons Akira in his mansion. Something terrible has happened…Ryo’s father, an important archeologist, has slowly gone mad, turning into a violent and possessed man, and finally after a painful descent into madness killed himself by burning himself to death, after making an important archeological discovery, a strange demon mask older than the human race itself.

The mask bears a secret in it’s insides: who wears it has a vision of the world of the demons, that ruled the Earth before the coming of man. The mask thus is an equivalent of the human history books, some kind of book for a race that didn’t write but communicated telepathically.
Ryo tells Akira to wear the mask, and he do so, thus seeing the ancient demon world. However, Ryo says, the demons are not dead and are preparing to walk the earth once more. The demons are not powerless either: humans have technology and science on their side, but demons have big supernatural powers: in particular the ability to fuse with other living organisms. Ryo and Akira are then attacked by a demon and so after a quick escape, Ryo brings Akira to a basement and explains his secret plan to him.

 

Ryo’s father tried to study and understand the nature of the demons by fusing with one of them, a demon that slowly took control of his mind making him mad. With a last spark of humanity, Ryo’s father decided to suicide in order to avoid to become fully a monster.
The only way to counter succesfully the attack of the demons is to fuse with them but without being controlled by them: to become a Devilman, a human’s heart nested into a demon’s body.
The two thus decide to try to do so. Ryo has organized a big chaotic party in the basement: demons like chaos, irrationality and are more inclined to fuse with humans under these conditions.
The chaotic party, similar to an antique Bacchanal, soon turns into a bloodfest: demons like violence too, and so Ryo starts a riot by slicing some people with an empty bottle. Soon demons start to fuse with the humans, but not with Ryo and Akira. When all seems lost, Akira mind shatters in pure terror and only then a demon fuses with him. The demon in one of the strongest and so easily disposes of the other demons…Akira has succesfully become a Devilman. Ryo is the only not-possessed human survivor of the slaughter. And so the adventures of Devilman and it’s strife against the demon race begins. This more or less summaries the first volume (of five) of the manga.

 

 

As you may guess reading this, this work is heavily psychological. The manga focuses a lot on this aspect, which is central both in the facts and in their developement. Also, coherently, the work takes a lot of material from ancient legends, myths and Christian religion and uses it in a very personal and unique way to convey it’s story and message.
The main themes are two central ideas that can be found in most of the successive work by Go Nagai: the impossibility of clearly separating “good” from “bad”, both in their outer manifestation and in their deep effects. Akira, like all the nagaian heroes, learns that in order to achieve the “good” he must first accept and know deeply the “bad” inside himself, which once integrated it becomes the source of physical and spiritual strenght: after fusing with the demon, he indeed manage to flourish it’s hidden talents, which were hidden in his defects: so his shyness becomes strenght and ability to deal efficently with the outer reality without losing oneself; his radical refuse of violence of strenght transforms into a wise use of it, and so on. This is a very big psychological truth, that can be found both in all of the major works by the great psychoanalysts of the past (for example Jung’s Shadow archetype and Otto Rank’s will therapy) and in the ancient eastern philosophies and spiritual traditions (for example Zen, Buddhism, The Hagakure; Taoism; Confucianism and so on). Everything has it’s contrary hidden deep in itself, nothing is strictly black or white: thus estabilishing a strict dualism, which strongly denies the “other” leads only to disaster, inner and outer; individual and collective. We can thus use this as a key to interpret what the symbol of the demon means in this work, but I will do it later, in the second part of the article.

The other important central theme is the sudden irruption of the irrational, the absurd, – in one word – of Chaos into the reality of everyday, a reality that may look calm, peaceful and tranquil on the surface but hides raging storms and cracking thunders in it’s deep recesses. However, as we saw earlier, these two apparently conflicting dimensions are not alien to each other, but in some way they complete and mirror each other. Things are not what they appear to be; the sudden invasion of Chaos shatters all the firm and strong ideas on which the common people clinged themselves to. How they will face that, when the cover is finally removed from the heart of the abyss that always lied nested deep in the reality of everyday? This is a very fascinating question, and Devilman responds to it in a very original and tought-provoking way.

Nagai in his recent comic-autobiography (different from the pages I’ve posted here on the site), Gekiman, has connected Devilman to his conception of war: this is certainly true, but on a bigger plane than the simple military conflict. In fact, Devilman tells the tale of a war, the war of humanity with itself, in a big denial process as Freud would tell: the strife against all the denied side of the human mind of emotion. Guilt, anger, anxiety, hate, scorn, unsatisfaction, fear but also hopes, will of change, strenght. This is the cauldron from which Chaos emerges into the world.

This manga, as you can guess, changed the world of comics forever. The influence it had both in Japan and in the West was and still is immense, and surely it’s a milestone. In nearly forty years from it’s publication it hasn’t aged a bit and is still a work of immense strenght, insight and cleverness. Definitevely a must read, indeed.

If you have read the manga and want to read my complete interpretation for it, proceed to the second part of the article. If you want to avoid spoilers, jump directly to the third part of the article.