Scummy Manga Reviews #4: Geki Man

Title: Gekiman (激マン) Lit: Hardcore-Man
Serialized in: Shukan Manga Goraku, 2010-present
Art and story by: Nagai Go and Dynamic Pro
Genre: Respect knuckles essay manga

What it's about:

1972 saw Japan riveted to the television in fear and revulsion. The United Red Army marched into homes with a marathon broadcast of the Asama-Sanso Incident, followed by the Lod Airport massacre in Tal Aviv. Yokoi Shoichi, a WWII holdout, returned home alive “with much embarrassment” after slinking in the jungles of Guam for nearly 20 years. And America had re-launched its mass bombings of Vietnam. If your job is to create dynamic, provocative imagery, how do you compete with the classic, chilling photograph of children running mortified from the acrid smoke of napalm death?

If you were Nagai Go, you’d start with something like this:


Gekiman is the autobiographical account of a young Nagai Go struggling to break out of his typecasting as the go-to guy for gag manga by breaking into the sophisticated world of story manga. Once establishing himself with bawdy comedies like Harenchi Gakuen (Shameless School) and Abashiri Ikka (The Abashiri Family), he experimented with a pair of dark adult narrative works, Oni and Mao Dante (Demon Lord Dante). Their critical successes propelled him to make the jump to primetime with his anti-social masterpiece that stained the verdant field of boy’s comics crimson with the blood of childhood innocence lost—Devilman.

Why it’s awesome:


These days there’s no shortage of guys making bank from the crude sketches you’d find in the notebooks of a junior high metalhead. Consciously or not, all of them are biting off a bit established by Nagai Go, the OG of hustling rudely drawn gore and tits for scratch. But he didn’t get rich overnight. He paid his dues as assistant to Ishinomori Shotaro, where he sacrificed sleep and shaved years off his life to produce prototype gag comics that would lead to his first serialized gig with Kodansha.

The man clawed his way up, and now that he’s at the top, he’s stretching his hand back down to help others make the climb.

The credits on the cover would lead you to believe that manga is one-man show, but in reality a successful author is more factory foreman than artist, juggling a team of talent to take care of everything from inking to backgrounds to character designs and even story development! Nagai Go has always been up front with crediting his team, Dynamic Pro, and with Gekiman he throws back the curtain to reveal each member, their artistic contribution to the big picture, and how hopelessly screwed he would be without all of them storming ahead at full steam every single day.

Nagai Go does more than just tip his hand. He lays his cards onto the table and goes all in. Names are dropped and shout outs leap from the page. No human work is created in a vacuum, and anyone who implies otherwise is a fraud and a thief. You get the feeling that he's trying to set the record straight. My best ideas actually belong to everyone else.

Bird-woman and woman-bird are two very different things.

One issue is dedicated to Tsuji Masaki, scriptwriter for the Devilman anime and all-around mystery buff, and how he fed Go the design for the iconic harpy-demon Silene. Incidentally, Nagai Go was grateful for having another pair of breasts to draw, and his editor was grateful for another outlet to crank up the nudity in the manga to differentiate it from the family-friendly anime.

There’s more to Gekiman than anecdotes from behind the drawing board at Kodansha. It represents manga’s oldest bad boy falling into step with the subliminal wave sweeping the industry at large.

Nagai Go’s development as an author mirrors the evolution of the medium. Cheap gag comics got the ball rolling and paved the way for character-driven story manga, which widened the playing field, allowing experience-centric essay manga to drive in a wedge and stake their claim. Though not in a position to usurp the throne, essay manga have been gradually picking up steam by combining the timing of gag manga and the narrative techniques of story manga. Oishinbo, My Darling is a Foreigner, and A Drifting Life are all excellent examples of the variety within the genre. With Gekiman, Nagai Go admits that the greatest story he has left to tell is the facts surrounding his fiction.

Why it won’t come out in America:


I’m sure many readers of the blog are familiar with the Devilman anime, but let’s see a show of hands from those of you that have read the actual manga. And I don’t mean the nostril-augmented monstrosity, Shin-Devilman, released by Danzig and Verotix. Scanlations don’t count either. That leaves either you who sluthed out the bilingual edition (Japan only, naturally), or those that hunkered down with the original moon language. In either case, it means you were forced to jump through flaming hoops for the privilege to read a cornerstone of the medium that should be readily available!

It’s almost as if there’s a conspiracy keeping Nagai Go's works quarantined to Japan.

Bone-crunching fight scenes, snot-nosed adolescents piloting giant robots, smutty hijinks rendered innocent by their sincerity—Japan’s greatest cultural products, both domestic and international, were first manufactured by Nagai Go and Dynamic Pro, but the profits for exports went straight to his predecessors. It’s a damn shame that the West has systematically been denied the chance to know the genesis behind its favorite “original” stories.

Three things Nagai Go hates: Hippies, drawing clothes on women, and people that borrow his car without filling the gas tank.

I wonder if Iwaashi Hitoshi would blush if you pointed out Parasyte is Devilman with tree hugging instead of nuclear war. Or if Miura Kentaro would openly admit that, yes, Guts and Griffith are essentially Akira and Ryo. I’m sure Anno Hideaki would break into a cold sweat if you showed him a side-by-side comparison of The End of Evangelion and Devilman's devise final scenes.

There’s a tacit understanding that no idea is truly original, and that it doesn’t matter where you got something, but where you take it. Still, credit earned is credit due. The class of authors inspired by Devilman will be remembered for their contributions to the next generation of manga-ka, while the man who laid the foundation they built their carnival tents on will be disregarded as embarrassingly old hat within a generation. And saddest of all, the West never had a chance to pick him up before unceremoniously dropping him with the recognition he deserved.