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 meta-style 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 American-style comic strips and heavily static, Japanese-style 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 ultra-fast, ultra brutal, hilariously sexual and satanic Heavy Metal…for 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 Nagai’s 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.

In terms of pushing boundaries, Go Nagai was actually way ahead of Metal chronologically, and Maou Dante proves this especially well. For reference, Maou Dante’s 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, wouldn't come out with albums until the mid-1970s, and the British Heavy Metal New Wave, exemplified by Iron Maiden, wouldn't 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 it's tempting to call Go Nagai's 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 Nagai’s stuff was boundary pushing for kids’ magazines in 1968 (when Harenchi Gakuen was published), insane violence, exploitative sexuality, and ridiculously demonic imagery were also just…less 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 full-throatedly Satanic 80s thrash.. Its like Slayer, Megadeth, Metallica, and Anthrax…but a comic...written by the Tails Gets Trolled guy.

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 1st-grade-level Japanese, but, honestly, reading some bad scanlations adds a lot to the effect. “I saw in a dream…the Himalaya!!” “Silly, you know that the Himalaya is far from Japan…” “But she doesn’t know…it wasn’t just the Himalaya…in my dream, I was a giant Demon!!!” (As far as I can tell, the Japanese shares this cadence). Animating this board-book take on a Sam Raimi movie with an infernal, crackling energy is the amazing--often amazingly stupid--sense 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 double-page spreads I’ve 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 Nagai’s demonology OC, Dante (he’s “something far, far greater than Satan, he’s…MAOU 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, then…Sodom and Gomorrah lore (featuring hovercars?) and an unfinished ending that leaves us with full-throated support for human elimination.

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, non-anatomical, semi-maturations of Tezuka-like 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 hand--like both the Satan worshippers and the leaders of an inexplicably armed cult of Christian soldiers that shows up to purge them--look like stooping golems with dead fish eyes, their faces carved from bubbling lime clay and pressed with a charcoal pencil. And you can’t talk about a Go Nagai fantasy manga without talking about the monsters--in this case the Demons, and sometimes Angels--and 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. Nagai’s multi-headed, multi-tailed, often multi-faced silhouette-beasts are formed out of swirling darkness or crackling fire, with big, cartoonish wings and limbs, plus big fuckoff chest-faces, 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 you’ve ever wondered what the famous quakingly-awesome 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 near-eastern fever dreams in modern far-eastern lunchbox-art form.

In short, Nagai’s 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 two-page 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 near-future 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 intensity--sometimes 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.

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 doesn’t 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 Nagai’s 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 so-called Demons are actually the transformed souls of the real, original humans (from the ancient, secular, edenic super-civilization of Sodom, of course) who were punished for not obeying God. Essentially, the whirlwind non-conclusion of this series is that so-called 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 humans--the demonized, the possessed, the minions of the so-called Dark One, can reclaim their rightful power, kill God, and inaugurate a new golden age. That’s what this manga is about: not just the sadness and rage of the marginalized, but the righteous, Satanically holy rage of the superior.

Viewed like that, this is actually kind of the opposite of Devilman. At worst, it even comes off as kinda fascist. Wait, no, it’s really fascist if you take it seriously as an allegory, which the stylistics make it weirdly tempting to do at times…and, taken as such, its not only kind of uncomfortable, but also narratively unsatisfying. To be fair to Nagai, it’s perfectly possible--and honestly, somewhat likely given Devilman’s direction--that 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 Dante’s suppressed memories directly), I have no choice but to judge the manga with this plot turn in mind. And…yeah, its sort of a bad plot turn on its face. A lot of the best scenes in the first volume--Ryou’s confused rage at being forced to inhabit the body of an infernal kaiju, and the Satanic cult’s dehumanizing desire to force a new identity onto their “Demon Lord,” contrary to his own, human desires--basically get blown away by this “evil is good, good is evil, now evil-good and good-evil 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 isn’t 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 beast-headed 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.

The fruit falls into my grasp…

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, that's all a work needs to win you over. If that's true of music, why can't 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. I've 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 Oda’s 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 can't 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?

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 has…a certain something. Maybe he's truly had a mystical experience, and communed with something beyond human understanding, something empyereal--or something infernal. That's 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 shocking--they certainly weren’t 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 impurity--but that feeling of zealotry still is, even to this day. It’s easy to forget that our ancestors, and even many people today, didn’t 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 wing-tinged 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 what’s 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 innocence--that makes Go Nagai a genius, and that makes Maou Dante a fascinating, uncut, bluntly destructive gem.