The Fall 2017 Manga Guide

Devilman Grimoire

What's It About? 

Miki Makihara has always claimed to be a witch with the powers of the legendary Solomon at her command thanks to a special ring. Her best friend Akira Fudo, who has lived with Miki's family since the deaths of his parents years ago, has never really believed her – until one night when the pair and their friends are attacked by demons. Miki summons the great demon Amon, who possesses Akira's body. Now Amon is ready to fight demons as he always has, but with one catch: Akira's still in his body in the form of latent will and memories, making it impossible for Amon to harm humans, especially Miki. Amon finds himself the unwilling (at first) protector of Miki's family and other people as the rest of the incoming demon horde tries to take him out while preying on the humans of Tokyo. Devilman Grimoire is a spin-off of Gō Nagai's 1972 manga Devilman. The original manga was adapted into an anime in 1972 and the character has had many guest appearances in other works. It was released by Seven Seas in October.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Amy McNulty

Rating: 2.5

Gō Nagai is one of the most famous mangaka the world over, though his heyday was several decades back. Devilman Grimoire is an attempt to bring one of his classics to a new generation via a less convoluted reboot. In that sense, it succeeds, offering up a taste of a Nagai title in an accessible new story. Grotesque and more than a little risqué, the first volume of Devilman Grimoire is more style than substance but manages to make the transformation of studious Akira from milquetoast into devil-may-care hoodlum after he's taken over by the demon Amon somewhat interesting. Miki, the chunibyo-deluded self-proclaimed witch and Akira's foster sister/love interest, manages to seem three-dimensional for the most part, but that may be largely due to her quirks. The fact that she barely feels guilty or upset after witnessing three classmates gruesomely devoured in front of her after a summoning gone wrong does keep her from becoming fully realized as a rounded character, but this isn't the type of series that dwells on realism regardless. Devilman Grimoire is over-the-top and makes no bones about it, moving from gruesome scene to salacious scene to gruesome, salacious scene and back again. Thus far, the stage is set for the feud between Amon and a variety of other demons, but the reasons behind the conflict and the demons' presence on Earth aren't given much importance, so the story feels shallow so far.

Takato does an amazing job of capturing Nagai's distinct style, infusing the series with a nostalgic, pulpy vibe that's perfect for the series. The repulsive appearance of the demons is particularly notable, and though the art often relies too heavily on screentones to convey darker moods, there are enough panels with well-crafted backgrounds to properly set the stage in contemporary Japan.

Devilman Grimoire volume 1 has the dual purpose of attracting a new audience and appealing to legions of long-time fans. On the first count, it does an adequate job of letting the reader dip their toe into a Gō Nagai experience. While the mature content ensures that it won't prove to every person's tastes, the reader who knows what they're in for will have a diverting time.

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Lynzee Loveridge

Rating:

Effectively stylized, dynamic artwork. Over the top action sequences to the point of parody. A devil-may-care protagonist that slaughters his foes indiscriminately. Devilman G has all the bombastic action and ultraviolence that cemented Gō Nagai's original creation when anime was all about exaggeration and firmly making its mark as “not for kids.” It also continues the tradition of reveling in sexual violence, graphically dismembering its female cast, and framing them as vulnerable for reader titillation.

The manga opens with a male turtle demon facing a female harpy demon with a second face where her vagina would be. The turtle demon splits her in half, fornicates the bottom half while eating the top half while saying, “You gotta do 'em while you eat 'em!” It doesn't slow down from there. The body count in this volume is high and overwhelmingly female and a large portion of those female bodies are also nude. A naked girl is strung up from a telephone pole naked while two demons eat her. Amon, the demon that possesses our once mousy protagonist, graphically imagines eating his best friend Miki while splitting her clothes down the front, exposing her breasts. This event doesn't even actually take place, but all women are fair game to be subjugated to this kind of violence within the story, regardless.

Violence and sex are intertwined in Devilman G, and what that routinely means is that its female characters are foremost meant to arouse readers before being brutalized. Or at the same time. But hey, that's what the original Devilman was about, right? It's from the same time period that gave us Mad Bull 34, Legend of the Overfiend, Kekko Kamen (another Gō Nagai creation) and a slew of other late 70s and early 80s OVAs that blurred the same lines between gory action and sex. An argument can be made that pushing those boundaries were the whole point, but from my perspective there was as little point then as there is now. It's not risky to threaten to rape women in comics anymore. It never was. It's demoralizing, which was my entire experience reading through these 200-odd pages. Given the reputation laid out in the first volume, I'm not holding out any hope for a decent treatment of the lesbian couple introduced, either.

It's all too bad because the artists involved in this work are great, and the comedy is genuinely fun in a cheesy way, ala Kill la Kill. The rest of it is entirely too much to stomach.

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Austin Price

Rating:

It seems odd that Gō Nagai's Devilman has enjoyed a renaissance in the last few years. Contrary to the clean-scrubbed image presented in Cyborg 009 Vs. Devilman or the art-house aesthetic of Masaaki Yuasa's upcoming DEVILMAN crybaby, the original manga was shockingly violent and sexual not only for its time, but even by contemporary standards. Worse, it was shamelessly so: Gō Nagai made no apology for flaunting his misanthropic and misogynistic id for everybody to see embodied in a parade of grotesqueries that regularly sported vagina dentata or phallic, veiny appendages and which had no qualms raping and eviscerating and disemboweling their way through hordes of students and one another.

Devilman Grimoire aims to recapture something of that vulgar, rebellious spirit, and although it's still as philosophically and socially retrograde as ever, there remains something about this fevered nightmare that is utterly compelling. Rui Takatō's art may bear some of the blame. While it might be argued it's too effective in emulating the strange plasticity of Nagai's style – a style that made it look as if every character's face was melting and as if even the humans were suffering severe mutations– this cartoonish cast actually works well for the story's juvenile sensibilities. It wants to be gross and childish and playful in all forms: what better way than to present itself upfront as warped?

Which is refreshing. Devilman Grimoire, deformities and all, knows not to marry its ultraviolence and awful attitudes to any pretense: this is the stuff of grind-house exploitation and is content to be nothing more. It takes no pains to pass as serious commentary, nor is there any great regard for craft. There's some talk about the “nature of man” and the human power of imagination, and the story cribs liberally from a plethora of mythological sources including modern occult theory and ancient Judaic tradition, but it's the playful and not particularly bright child's mishmash of concepts, not the scholar's serious study. What it offers instead is a gleeful and nihilistic romp so absurd it cannot be taken seriously.

That's not to argue that it does not possess some kind of power, though. Nagai has always had a sense for body horror, one on full display here. His monster designs are some of the most uncanny in the medium precisely because they're so uninhibitedly childish, and his use of violence often proves more upsetting than it likely should. Something about the way he presents these creatures – all distorted maws and globby flesh and lunatic expressions – and the way he and surrogate artists like Takato render severed limbs and gored torsos speaks to the essential, upsetting fleshiness of our existence. Serve as cruel reminder that we're all base matter only ever a genetic glitch or vital accident away from resembling these monstrosities.

It never goes far beyond shocking, but this capacity for horror and the other tasteless elements that make up Devil Man Grimoire add up to a refreshingly – albeit vile -- reprieve from a contemporary action scene that too often feels stuck between the painfully earnest and the suffocatingly serious.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Devilman Grimoire comes from a manga by Gō Nagai, creator of Cutie Honey and, perhaps more relevantly, Kekko Kamen, where a girl fights naked but for a mask and boots. Therefore it is no surprise that a lot of elements of this series are sexualized to the point of ludicrousness – check out the panel there with the harpy with a toothy mouth for a vulva. But while we can see it as demonizing female sexuality (and thus far most of the sexually active females are actual demons), in the context of the story, it's more of an element of total absurdity, just another arrow in Nagai's quiver of blurring the lines between fanservice and ridiculousness.

Fanservice aside (and we do see plenty of Akira's newly buff body, so there's some equality here), the story is interesting. I do feel badly for Akira, who seems to have been largely erased once Amon takes over his body, but Akira was so unhappy and afraid all of the time that Amon's possession might be a mixed blessing. Since the original manga was an anti-war protest, it'll be worth paying attention to see if that holds true here as well, and given that Amon makes a few comments towards the end that could amount to humanity needing to be saved from itself, that does seem possible. The volume is a mix of gore, boobs, random almost-sex scenes, and serious conversations between Amon and others, making it feel like it really does have a little something for almost everyone.

To be perfectly honest, I did not expect to enjoy this book as much as I did. It's gratuitous in almost everything, but about halfway through, Amon becomes grounded as a character, and with Miki accepting this new “Akira,” we see that she's more than just the sweet(ish) love interest. This has a good amount of potential, and the art is very reminiscent of the original series without being a slave to recreating the 1970s, forming a nice mix of styles. Seven Seas' representative commented that this was a good entry to the Devilman franchise, and I'm inclined to agree with him – not only did the book leave me wanting volume two, but also curious to check out the original.