Manga in Japan was kind of like Rock and Roll in the United States and Great Britain. Sure other places had popular music before and other places had comics but bands in the United States and Great Britain not only invented a brand new metastyle of music but went on to rapidly iterate upon and continually reinvent it over the next 20 or 30 years to the extent that they essentially wrote the global blueprint for modern music which all other cultures in the world went on to copy. In around the same space of time manga transformed from a very loose mix of adapted Americanstyle comic strips and heavily static Japanesestyle emonogatari into an innovative and absurdly prolific tradition all its own with just as many genres and reinventions as its musical counterpart. By the 1970s each tradition was an integral part of the national cultures from which they originated. Every American had their favorite performers and bands and every home its collection of choice vinyl records. Similarly on the bookshelves of every Japanese family was bound to be at least a few volumes of Tezuka Yokoyama Saito or Chiba. And so it caused genuine societal waves in each culture when those art forms were pushed in new directions. In music terms if gekiga in general was Hard Rock Go Nagai and his cohorts were ultrafast ultra brutal hilariously sexual and satanic Heavy Metalfor kids. Nagai took advantage of a rapidly advancing and experimental scene to push the boundaries of mainstream Japanese society in a very specific way. He created edgy horny immoral stupid nonsense for mainstream kids magazines and was so successful at it that he became essentially the successor to the throne of marketable shounen manga that Tezuka and Yokoyama had pioneered in the decade before. TV executives were lining up outside his studio just for a chance to water down his work into a nearly unrelated superhero cartoon with his name and characters. So dominant were the franchises created by Go Nagai and his Dynamic Productions that even today shouwa era kids tell fond stories of sharing Nagais boobie manga with their friends at school and getting it confiscated by angry teachers of his manga being the source of their passion for giant robots demonic apocalypses beautiful fighting girls or joke side characters that are literally just despicable sex criminals. 640https://i.ur.com/ELqUddY.png In terms of pushing boundaries Go Nagai was actually way ahead of Metal chronologically and Maou Dante proves this especially well. For reference Maou Dantes entire serialization came out in 1971 the same year that on the island on the opposite side of Eurasia Heavy Metal was just being born with the likes of Black Sabbath. The other iconic early bands of the genre like Judas Priest Motorhead and Rainbow wouldnt come out with albums until the mid1970s and the British Heavy Metal New Wave exemplified by Iron Maiden wouldnt happen until the 1980s which would also be the decade that saw Metal advance into more extreme genres like Thrash Death Doom and Black Metal. So while its tempting to call Go Nagais more demonic work essentially the Black Sabbath of manga due to its place in time the truth is that he was already way ahead of them in his mastery of tapping the angry sad demonic human id. For one even though Nagais stuff was boundary pushing for kids magazines in 1968 when Harenchi Gakuen was published insane violence exploitative sexuality and ridiculously demonic imagery were also justless taboo in Japan at the time at least in stuff aimed at adults. What all of this means is that Demon Lord Dante is less like classic Heavy Metal and not even really like Doom Metal or Speed Metal really more than anything else Demon Lord Dante has the energy of fullthroatedly Satanic 80s thrash.. Its like Slayer Megadeth Metallica and Anthraxbut a comic...written by the Tails Gets Trolled guy. 640https://i.ur.com/7H4ImDK.png To be clear: this is amazing. The experience of reading this manga is quite like music largely plotless and impressionistic. Pages are formed of usually no more than three panels and quite often only one and consist of huge simple images with a few words of sledgehammer dialog or descriptions. The text in the raws was simple enough that I could honestly make it out with my 1stgradelevel Japanese but honestly reading some bad scanlations adds a lot to the effect. I saw in a dreamthe Himalaya Silly you know that the Himalaya is far from Japan But she doesnt knowit wasnt just the Himalayain my dream I was a giant Demon As far as I can tell the Japanese shares this cadence. Animating this boardbook take on a Sam Raimi movie with an infernal crackling energy is the amazingoften amazingly stupidsense of flow between images. Constant giant motion is built up through hyperactive perspective changes and ridiculous figurative cinematic techniques then climaxed in some of the most simple yet arresting doublepage spreads Ive ever seen even by Go Nagai standards. This constant visual inventivess carries us through an unabated flow of fucking cool ass crazy fucking ass images whose bluntness only adds to feeling of often salivating bloodlust they convey. And bloodlust indeed: this story for what it is goes crazy. We cut from a guy flipping out in the mountains and teleporting to the awakening of Go Nagais demonology OC Dante hes something far far greater than Satan hesMAOU DANTE and then we cut to some Satanists doing an actual black sabbath then emotional apocalypse kaiju fights in a city being constantly shelled by oddly realistic soldiers thenSodom and Gomorrah lore featuring hovercars? and an unfinished ending that leaves us with fullthroated support for human elimination. 700https://i.ur.com/CT2YQVb.png This kind of plot coupled with the types of imagery and visual techniques that I described may make this manga sound illegible disorienting or even genuinely horrific but the magic of Go Nagai is that the actual feelings he conveys usually go down surprisingly easy at least to me. This is thanks to the often astonishing simplicity and even innocence of his artwork. Humans are these blobby nonanatomical semimaturations of Tezukalike cartoon characters and they are often surrounded by screentones or even just simple freehanded shapes and patterns to bluntly convey fairly simple emotions. Young heroes or what passes for such in this type of story have unkempt and dynamic black hair with tornado bangs battleship sideburns and eyes from a chaos dimension of passion and sorrow. Crusty old villains on the other handlike both the Satan worshippers and the leaders of an inexplicably armed cult of Christian soldiers that shows up to purge themlook like stooping golems with dead fish eyes their faces carved from bubbling lime clay and pressed with a charcoal pencil. And you cant talk about a Go Nagai fantasy manga without talking about the monstersin this case the Demons and sometimes Angelsand how they embody a boldly simplistic yet oddly baroque style that constituted nothing less than a sea change in the history of Japanese monster design. Nagais multiheaded multitailed often multifaced silhouettebeasts are formed out of swirling darkness or crackling fire with big cartoonish wings and limbs plus big fuckoff chestfaces that echo the silliest ideas of midcentury rubber suit toku movies while also looking like genuinely abominable biblical heralds from the battle of Har Maggeddon. If youve ever wondered what the famous quakinglyawesome mystical angels or beasts of prophecy from Revelation and Daniel were possibly supposed to look like you can honestly look no further than the titular Dante or the towering fire angels of Jehovah whose designs resurrect ancient neareastern fever dreams in modern fareastern lunchboxart form. 720https://i.ur.com/sLJ5VH1.png 720https://i.ur.com/lVcnyd2.png In short Nagais art in this manga and most of his others feels like a direct conduit to the imagination of a rambunctious slightly twisted child at zooming play. One of the practical benefits of this approach is that these crazy scenes like ripping guitar solos rising above the mix are often remarkably legible for what they are with simplified and stark color separation bolstering devilishly dramatic compositions. At the same time Nagai knows when and how to crank up the background noise sometimes allowing bizarrely detailed backgrounds no doubt drawn by his assistants to crowd out negative spaces filling compositions with bursts of grandly claustrophobic mayhem often following a twopage spread meant to serve solely as an establishing shot of the grand or bizarre landscape at hand. This is best at the height of the series destructive fights where wacky sonic waves mingle with napalm cluster bombs in a baroque nearfuture cityscape of randomly stacked shapes to produce explosive Death Metal blast beats that furiously strafe across the page. Even though everything in this manga is cranked up past 10 this sense of visual variance creates actual range in the intensitysometimes 15 sometimes 20 sometimes even just 11. This is critical for the thing that makes this manga genuinely stand out not just as an impressionistic set of images but as a loose kind of narrative which is its remarkable portrayal of emotion. 720https://i.ur.com/XyTrC4h.png 720https://i.ur.com/6QFnGca.png Maou Dante is an expression of hatred sadness and rage. Unsurprisingly for a precursor to Devilman it explores these things in much the same ways as that later work but in a significantly more unfettered amoral and even kinda scary way. See in Devilman the idea is that demons are an expression of chaos and desire rebelling against an uncaring lifelessly orderly god. They are misunderstood by humans whose own demonic and chaotic natures in response to the demon invasion ultimately cause their own extinction but that doesnt mean they themselves are in the right. Devilman is nuanced in that it believes that every group from the most heroic to the most demonic has the potential to be both victim and abuser both savior and adversary. The funny thing is though that Go Nagais style is not really equipped to actually handle that kind of nuance which is part of why revisionist reimaginings like Devilman: Crybaby arguably execute his ideas better than he did. What Go Nagai is equipped for is Maou Dante a series where God is an explicitly evil Demiurge and where socalled Demons are actually the transformed souls of the real original humans from the ancient secular edenic supercivilization of Sodom of course who were punished for not obeying God. Essentially the whirlwind nonconclusion of this series is that socalled current humans actually soulless minions of God an omnicidal interstellar impostor are cruel paranoid witch hunters not because of their own choices but by their very natures as soulless NPC sheep. The only solution is to wipe them all out so that the real humansthe demonized the possessed the minions of the socalled Dark One can reclaim their rightful power kill God and inaugurate a new golden age. Thats what this manga is about: not just the sadness and rage of the marginalized but the righteous Satanically holy rage of the superior. 640https://i.ur.com/7nhdbCs.png Viewed like that this is actually kind of the opposite of Devilman. At worst it even comes off as kinda fascist. Wait no its really fascist if you take it seriously as an allegory which the stylistics make it weirdly tempting to do at timesand taken as such its not only kind of uncomfortable but also narratively unsatisfying. To be fair to Nagai its perfectly possibleand honestly somewhat likely given Devilmans directionthat he meant to subvert this explanation later on in the story. Since the manga was cancelled prematurely though and since the way that both Ryou/Dante and the reader are presented with this exposition seems extremely conclusive Medusa literally accesses Dantes suppressed memories directly I have no choice but to judge the manga with this plot turn in mind. Andyeah its sort of a bad plot turn on its face. A lot of the best scenes in the first volumeRyous confused rage at being forced to inhabit the body of an infernal kaiju and the Satanic cults dehumanizing desire to force a new identity onto their Demon Lord contrary to his own human desiresbasically get blown away by this evil is good good is evil now evilgood and goodevil fight simplification. Like every album by Slayer this Satanic posturing hides a fundamentally perhaps even fundamentalist Christian worldview just one that picks the red team instead of the blue one. So yes its not narratively very good in the end which ultimately makes me glad that Devilman ended up being the completed work instead of this insane potentially even hateful nonsense. So despite its arresting visuals Maou Dante isnt a good manga. It works as a prototype for Devilman but stands as little more than a curiosity by itself. At worst it transforms the type of manic passion that Nagai is brilliant at conveying into a problematically genocidal apocalypticism which makes it uncomfortable to read so it might be best to stay away from it. Five out of te But suddenly a figure creeps into the farthest bounds of my peripheral vision. Who could it be? I struggle to catch a glimpse turning wheeling. My pulse roils in my ears. I dare to close my eyes to open them again and now the creature looms before me. I start unable to make a sound. He is the lord of darkness himself Incarnated as an old haggard man. As a slithering serpent. As a beastheaded desert king. As a smirking Japanese man sitting at a cramped drawing desk. He offers me knowledge power pleasure beyond my wildest dreams. All I have to do is give into my emotions. All I have to do is Rate Maou Dante higher than Yu Yu Hakusho. 640https://i.ur.com/A4KBRaM.png The fruit falls into my grasp 620https://i.ur.com/i3E8cA1.png See sometimes its fun to embrace crazy ideas and to indulge in dark fantasies via art. And sometimes if those emotions are crafted powerfully and uniquely enough thats all a work needs to win you over. If thats true of music why cant it be true of manga? Sure some people mostly under 15 years old or so I hope have argued that as a narrative medium manga has to excel narratively to be considered truly great. Ive encountered these people dismissing praise for the kind of powerful visual climaxes that manga and anime can produce as hype moments and aura a reference as far as I can tell to their collective strawman of people who speedread Shounen Jump for the epic One Piece clashes without critiquing the contradictions in Odas worldbuilding or whatever the fuck. While it is far out of my wheelhouse to intervene in a dumb people civil conflict it should be obvious that the cinema sins college paper rubric approach to manga criticism is in no way the only alternative to having no opinion whatsoever on what you speedread. The obvious basic truth even to me an absolute beginner to manga who cant even draw is that visual narratives can only be talked about holistically. The presentation is part of the narrative and the narrative part of the affective visual experience. This still leaves the question though: what is so great about this holistic work which really amounts to a manically scribbled cartoon car crash fueled by overblown hatred and clogged with enough pulp to destroy a paper factory? 640https://i.ur.com/CpKidjU.png Well its that this manga is unabashedly unashamedly demonic. Go Nagai may be kind of a stupid writer which kinda makes me not take the political implications of this story all that seriously but he clearly hasa certain something. Maybe hes truly had a mystical experience and communed with something beyond human understanding something empyerealor something infernal. Thats the only thing I can think of to explain the zealous destructive fire that burns in the eyes of this manga which I would go so far as to say resembles the comics of Jack Chick more than those of Osamu Tezuka. The demons themselves may not be shockingthey certainly werent at the time in Japan a country that gave colonialist Christian missionaries what was coming to them in the early 1600s and so was more concerned about boobs and gore than religious impuritybut that feeling of zealotry still is even to this day. Its easy to forget that our ancestors and even many people today didnt just consider demonic depictions to be offensive they considered them dangerous. To create heretical texts or to depict and praise infernal forces was to invite supernatural calamity that threatened lives and destroyed souls. In our modern liberal context things like hatred zealotry terrorism and incitement to violence are those kinds of dangers. Problematic right wingtinged media is a kind of heresy. I think this is usually a reasonable boundary to draw although not of course one to enforce violently because such things in real life are dangerous destructive and even inherently evil. But whats wrong with playfully flirting a little with the infernal? With putting your hands a little bit closer to the fire knowing that you never intend to actually touch it? Its holistically creating that often shocking feeling of genuine moral discomfort but with the edge taken off just enough by a mountain of inexplicable cartoon innocencethat makes Go Nagai a genius and that makes Maou Dante a fascinating uncut bluntly destructive gem. 640https://i.ur.com/TqwBnDL.png