It seems that no matter how old one gets there are still things that can make you hesitant or scared. Then again in my case have I only gotten more hesitant and scared? Perseverance huh? Well that’s todays moral.
And just to break my habits and ruin the hell out of it for some people (so if you don’t like things ruined then don’t past this point), as far as I can tell the Violence Jack manga is the confusing sequel to the original Devilman manga. Since all I read of Violence Jack (which is a pretty unpleasant series) was the bizarre ending and the surreal Mazinger story arc I can’t say for sure whether the whole thing was planned that way or whether Nagai Go just came up with the idea to have it be the sequel some years after it started. I suspect the latter. Actually I’m sure it was the latter because I read somewhere that he doesn’t plan his work in advance and just takes things as they come to him. A contemporary work I would compare Violence Jack to offhand is The Dark Tower novel series by Stephen King. That’s almost a spoiling comparison. Have I made this comparison before? Aside from working past characters from other works in, some in cameo, some in canon, what I’m really thinking of from the comparison is that both authors just let the story carry them along to its conclusion rather than intending everything to go that way. In the realm of anime and manga Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles by CLAMP is a similar concept, I recall hearing that members of CLAMP are Nagai/Devilman fans. Tsubasa is markedly less unpleasant to read but at the same time it’s not a particularly powerful work (I like CLAMP’s xxxHolic the best out of their works).
Well back to the point I’m not intimately familiar with Devilman but I do know that there have been a lot of manga incarnations (10 or more), some by Nagai and some not. I think that most are alternate versions but some are surely derivative of others that came before. So in that sense Violence Jack is probably directly related only to the original manga series as far as I can tell, and it thereby presents a continuation and an end therein (I heard there was a second Violence Jack work that started more recently but whether that itself is a sequel or alternate violence jack…). But just because it derives from the original doesn’t mean that it’s intended as the true version, the true continuation, the true end. Or maybe it is I really don’t know since I’ve never looked into it that deeply.
As a side note in Nagai’s case I think that he continues to work on his franchises after all these years out of consideration for his fans rather than desire for fame and wealth. His older works are pretty off the wall compared to things he was able to put together more recently. Unfortunately with so much stuff floating out there now it’s really hard to figure out what the real deal is if you don’t know japanese very well. I suspect that even for japanese natives or perhaps Nagai himself it’s still hard to figure things out… Oh well.
