halp gaf I need your advice on some anime
Just finished watching cyborg 009 vs devilman on netflix and it was freaking awesome.
The art style and action was great. I know nothing of either series but it was still highly enjoyable.
Where should I go to get more of that kind of each?
OH OH ME ME ME PICK ME
OK so Devilman is like, the best thing ever. It's what got me into anime and it's still one of my favorites.
To start out, I would recommend viewing the OVAs produced in 1987 and 1990, called "The Birth" and "Demon Bird Sirene" respectively. These adapt the first two volumes of the manga, which is five volumes long, along with a bit of additional and changed up content (I would call the OVAs the superior versions of volumes 1 and 2 for the most part). The only official release of the OVAs with English subs was an old VHS release, so you'll most likely need to download this from somewhere. Manga Video put out a DVD release around 2000 or so, but it was dub only and the dub is legendarily awful. Like, not even funny-bad, just plain really bad. Sadly volumes 3 through 5 of the manga have no anime adaptation, because after the second OVA funding couldn't be secured to produce the remaining three episodes at the same level of quality as the first two, and the director didn't want to do it otherwise.
After that, I would recommend reading the original manga (just "Devilman", not "Neo Devilman" or "Amon: Darkside of Devilman" or "Devilman Lady" or any of the other spinoffs), which is only five volumes long. Start from the beginning even though you've already watched the two OVAs, there's some minor differences in the content. The manga is unlicensed, the only thing that resembles an "official" English translation was a strange comic book format release of a few chapters in America and the entire series in a dual language format (Kodansha released some manga as learning tools in Japan). The dual language books are hard to track down I think, I remember them going for like 100 dollars for the whole series on eBay years ago. So just use a scanlation site or something.
After that you're free to check out whatever. I'd recommend checking out "Neo Devilman" first, which contains a bunch of side stories by various authors as well as a couple of additional chapters by the original author. Most are interesting, some are good, a few are really weird or awful.
The Demon Lord Dante manga is nice to check out if you want to see the prototype of the concept, and the anime adaptation which has an actual ending is pretty fun to watch and incredibly batshit, even if the actual objective quality would be best described as "kind of bad". The script for the anime was done by Shozo Uehara, who worked on a bunch of very strange tokusatsu shows including
all 49 episodes of Space Sherrif Shaider. The later half of the series is anime original and manages to be even crazier in some ways than the original material.
Amon: Darkside of Devilman is OK but fairly confusing. has nice art though. Unlicensed.
The Devilman Lady manga is quite interesting but also takes the violence from the original manga and kicks it up even higher to levels I find a little uncomfortable at times, plus the ending is just out there even by Go Nagai standards. Unlicensed (seeing a pattern yet?)
The Devilman Lady anime is an entirely different story from the manga that was overseen by Chiaki Konaka (Texhnolyze, Lain) who plotted it out and wrote 10 out of 26 episodes. It's quite good with one of my favorite protagonists in anime, and it's a shame that it gets overlooked compared to Konaka's other work. ADV put out the series on DVD forever ago, you might be able to track it down but more likely you'll have to resort to downloading it.
The "Amon: Apocalypse of Devilman" OVA is the closest thing we have to an anime adaptation of the final parts of the manga, but it's over the top violence-for-the-sake-of-violence and DBZ-ish fights both feel out of place. Pretty the only piece of Devilman related media I actively dislike. Unlicensed. Also I'm pretty sure the only subtitles available for this are really bad HK bootleg subs, at least that was the case when I watched it.
And then there's the original anime from the 1970s which actually was thought out before the manga. It's really just a fairly standard monster of the week show, but at the time it was one of the best of its kind. Nice to watch if you're interested in something that's super retro, plus the theme song is
the best kind of cheese. This one is actually licensed and has a current-ish release by Discotek.
So to recap...
Definitely check out
OVAs from 1987 and 1990
The original manga
Devilman Lady anime
Worth checking out
Devilman Lady manga
Neo Devilman
Not necessarily good, but interesting
Devilman 1970s anime
Amon: Darkside of Devilman
Demon Lord Dante
Avoid
Amon OVA
You'll have to ask someone else for 009, I never got all that into it.
EDIT: I forgot about the Devilman live action movie. It's pretty bad but had very nice special effects at the time it came out for a Japanese live action flick. Might be worth checking out if you just want to see cool designs moving around. There's a scene where Ryo kills a bunch of guys with an uzi that's pretty funny, and despite the sort of laughable leadup to the ending they did nail the final couple scenes IIRC. I think there was an official release of some sort for it some years back, but I don't remember for sure.
EDIT 2: If you liked the 009 parts and you want more Ishinomori stuff I can recommend checking out the Kamen Rider Black manga at least, that was pretty good.
