Nagai might hope the reader would blanch at Ryo’s callous slaughtering of a band of revelers he recruited in a ploy to draw out demons, but he plays this and other story beats with such over-the-top abandon that they come across less as serious commentary on the evil that lurks in the heart of men the characters’ grave monologues suggest than as the stuff of absurdist comedy. The major plot points are much the same: Fudo Akira is still the spineless wretch who gives his body and soul to the demon Amon so that he might gain the power and courage necessary to fight off the waking demon hordes that seek to reclaim the Earth they long ago abandoned friend and partner Ryo is still the comically sociopathic aristocrat who espouses goals that sound altruistic in theory but suggest more sinister designs in practice. To be sure, Devilman IS a crass work, every bit as stupid and preachy and ugly as the worst elements of its adaptation and defenders would suggest.
What’s most striking upon actually reading the first half of the original Devilman (available in English for the first time in three decades after publisher Seven Seas fished it from the licensing hell Glenn Danzig’s vanity press Verotik's brutal mishandling once stranded it in the second half will follow in October) is how wrong everyone – not just the fans, not just myself, but Yuasa and Okouchi, as well – got it.
#Devilman manga laced with drugs series
Nagai is after all the overgrown child best known for penning super-robot slugfests like Mazinger and impossibly horny magical girl series like Cutie Honey, a schlockmeister who mistakes wrathful rants about justice and peace delivered over tableaus of splatterhouse gore for the stuff of great insight and sexual comedy so crass it borders on the misogynistic for satire it seemed telling to me that his most stalwart fans would defend what was dullest and ugliest in Crybaby as the product of Nagai’s genius alone. That a glut of YouTube pedants masquerading as critics and hordes of gatekeeping beardos emerged in Crybaby’s wake to explain how Yuasa’s adaptation owed its depth and power to Nagai’s original Devilman manga only confirmed my suspicions. It was sophomoric in the extreme, an attribute I was happy to ascribe as much to Go Nagai, author of the original Devilman manga, as to Yuasa or series writer Ichiro Okouchi.
Gone were the well-observed character studies and deep warmth that characterized earlier Yuasa works, replaced wholesale by a middle-brow treatise on the seeming-apocalyptic horrors of puberty, the evils of sanctimonious prejudice, and the saving grace of love that papered over its shallow philosophizing with grandiose but vapid Biblical imagery and muddled plotting that left the series feeling more like a clip-show than a fully-realized story. Like all Yuasa series it was an undeniable joy to watch, a kaleidoscope of avant-garde animation techniques, brilliant color design, and dizzying cuts it was also a complete slog to sit through. While I’ve long championed Masaaki Yuasa as one of the most singular voices in animation, I was less taken with his Devilman Crybaby than the mass of critics.
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