Where to Start with Go Nagai
— Devilman First, and What You Can Read in English

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If you are reading Go Nagai for the first time, make your first work Devilman: The Classic Collection. In English it is a story you can finish in two hardcovers, and it becomes the yardstick for the rest of Nagai’s work. Mazinger Z and Cutie Honey will tempt you too, but for today, one work is enough.

This is a good moment to begin. The Go Nagai Wonderland Museum in Wajima was damaged in the Noto Peninsula earthquake of January 1, 2024. The exhibits were thought to have been lost to fire, but 108 original drawings and a number of figures were found inside the building, whose outer walls had burned black. An exhibition built around the works on display at the museum when the disaster struck, The Undying Power: Go Nagai — Go Nagai Museum Revival (our translation), is scheduled at the Museum of Kyoto from November 28, 2026, to January 11, 2027.

The best place to start

If you read in English

After Devilman, choose just one path. English editions are limited, so the list is short.

Know what is in the book. Seven Seas’ two volumes were announced as Nagai’s original Devilman manga, but they may not match the weekly serial page for page. A review at Manga Bookshelf reports hearing from the translator, Zack Davisson, that the collection draws on several variants of the manga, and that the time-travel chapters, the final five stories of Volume 1, come from Shin Devilman, a 1979 sequel. Publishers Weekly’s review of Volume 1 also mentions Akira traveling through time to fight demons tampering with historical figures such as Joan of Arc, Adolf Hitler and Marie Antoinette. So if the story suddenly turns into time travel near the end of Volume 1, your copy is not wrong. We could not confirm which Japanese edition the book follows.

For most of Nagai’s best-known work, we could not confirm an official English edition of the manga: Mazinger Z, Great Mazinger, Getter Robo in its full form, Violence Jack, Demon Lord Dante, Devilman Lady, Harenchi Gakuen, The Abashiri Family and Gekiman! The database MangaUpdates lists all of them as not licensed in English (for Getter Robo, its 1974 entry; the one partial English release we found, Venger Robo, belongs to the later Getter Robo Go and is covered below), and we found no announcement of a new edition. Links in the Japanese path below search for Japanese books, and Amazon.com may show few results.

If you read Japanese

After Devilman, choose one of three paths. You do not need to follow them all in order.

The demon path gets longer as it goes. The 45 books of Violence Jack are a real commitment, so you can leave it out of your first choices. If long series are not for you, try the single book of Shin Devilman after Devilman. It is a side story in which Akira Fudo and Ryo Asuka cross time and space and meet historical figures.

Books that are easy to mix up

Several English books carry a famous name but are a different story from the original manga.

Demons and robots arrived within about three years

Try to read Nagai in publication order and you will soon be confused, because signature works from different paths began at almost the same time. Here are their starting points, from sources such as the works list of Nagai’s company, Dynamic Planning.

Devilman and Mazinger Z ran at the same time in separate weekly magazines, from October 1972 to June of the next year. The same person was drawing a story about demons and a story about giant robots in the same months. These works are not linked as a single story, so following the timeline from the top will not give you a continuous plot. It is more natural to start from the path that interests you.

At the root of the demon path is Demon Lord Dante. Devilman was built on it, as a work with “a demon as the hero” (our translation). The 1971 serial was left unfinished when its magazine closed, and a remake that began in 2002 completed it. We suggest reading it after Devilman, as a way of tracing the prototype. Different stories share the same title, so if you buy the Japanese e-book, check a sample first.

“The original” means something different for each work

The most confusing thing about Nagai’s work is that the relationship between manga and anime changes from title to title. If you open the manga with memories of the anime, it may look like a different story. That does not mean your memory is wrong.

So it is more fun not to expect the manga to serve as an answer key for the anime. Open it as a different story that happens to have the same name.

In Japan, Devilman and Mazinger Z change by edition

This section is for buyers of Japanese editions. Devilman has been reworked almost every time it has been collected, and there are three main lines plus commemorative editions.

For a first read in Japanese, we recommend the original line. The story runs as it did in the serial, and Shin Devilman can be read separately later. Behind the additions is Nagai’s own feeling that, between a busy schedule and problems with assistants, the work had not come out as well as it should have during the serial. If you want to compare, that can wait.

In digital form, ebookjapan lists the 5 books of Devilman and Shin Devilman separately. The product pages do not make it easy to see which edition is the source, so it is safest to check a sample before you buy.

Mazinger Z is more tangled still. Some older collections mixed the Weekly Shōnen Jump and TV Magazine serials, with chapters out of order and some left out. The 1999 Kodansha manga bunko is said to be the first to include both serials in an order faithful to their publication. If you want to read in serial order now, the candidate is the 2009 new edition, Mazinger Z Original Ver., 4 volumes. In Kodansha’s list of contents, it runs in order from chapter 1 of the Weekly Shōnen Jump serial, and the second half of the last volume holds all 13 chapters from TV Magazine. The revised edition of Mazinger Z, 4 volumes from 2013 to 2014, instead includes every chapter but rearranges the order heavily to bring Mazinger Z to a complete ending. If you want to read it as one finished story, that one suits you better.

Read Getter Robo in publication order

In the Japanese Getter Robo series, the order of events in the story and the order of publication are different.

In story order, Shin Getter Robo falls between G and Go. Even so, for a first read we recommend publication order. Shin Getter Robo reveals what really happened in a mystery from Go, so reading it first removes the mystery. In the collected Getter Robo Saga, however, parts of Go were redrawn to match Shin, so how much of the mystery remains depends slightly on the edition you read.

Know this up front: the series has no ending. Arc stopped when its magazine closed, and Ken Ishikawa died in 2006. The main story remains unfinished. If you want a conclusion, pick it up knowing that.

For comedy, Harenchi Gakuen and Cutie Honey

The work that made Nagai’s name was not about demons or robots. It was Harenchi Gakuen. It appeared as a one-shot in the first issue of Weekly Shōnen Jump, became popular and turned into a serial. The uproar seems to have spread after a newspaper covered it in 1970, and with its sexual content and criticism of teachers treated as a problem, PTAs and boards of education around Japan sent complaints to the editors. There were voices in its defense, too. Some scenes are hard to accept by today’s standards. Read with that in mind, it shows what the author of Devilman was breaking open in boys’ magazines.

Cutie Honey is an action story whose lead is an android girl who transforms. It is short. In English it is a single hardcover, Cutie Honey: The Classic Collection, published on August 28, 2018, which collects the two volumes of the 1973 manga. It is the easiest way into this path.

If you know the anime

The 1972 Devilman TV anime was, as a rule, a hero show with self-contained episodes. The manga has horror as its theme and grows into a larger story as it goes. If you only remember the TV version, it is best to treat the manga as a different work with the same title.

If you came in through Devilman Crybaby in 2018, you already know the bones of the story. Even so, it should read differently in the art and words of the 1970s. Start by opening the first volume. You can decide then whether to go on.

In North America, English Wikipedia lists Discotek Media as the home video licensee for the Devilman and Mazinger Z TV series, and Sentai Filmworks as the licensee for the 2021 Getter Robo Arc anime. If the manga is out of reach in English, these are another way in.

For readers who have finished (spoilers from here)

Open this section after you have finished Devilman. Here is the reason to follow the demon path. These works are available in Japanese only, as far as we could confirm.

Violence Jack began right after Devilman ended. It is a story about the lawless zone left by a great earthquake in the Kanto region, and at first no link to Devilman was shown. Then the 1990 ending made the entire work an aftermath of the Devilman manga. After 17 years, with interruptions, the story comes home, and that landing is said to have been unexpected even to Nagai. Whether you read those 45 books knowing that is up to you.

Devilman Lady was also not called a sequel at first. It begins in a world where a manga called Devilman is widely known, and from the middle it connects to the main story.

Save the Devilman chapters of Gekiman! for last. The lead is a manga artist modeled on Go Nagai, and it shows what went on behind the scenes of the serial. The Devilman inside this work is newly drawn, not reprinted, so readers who have finished get to see the same scenes once more.