Best of Boxpunx number 20 is Devilguy! Inspired, er... directly based on the character Devilman. Here's what Wikipedia has to say, and I am pretty sure it is accurate.
"Devilman (Japanese: デビルマン Hepburn: Debiruman?) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Go Nagai which originally started as an anime adaptation of the concept of Nagai's previous manga series, Demon Lord Dante. A 39 episode anime series was developed by Toei in 1972 and Nagai began Devilman as a manga in Kodansha's Weekly Shōnen Magazine, barely a month before the anime series started. The series has since spawned numerous OVAs, manga, novels, and films."
Even though the series came out in Japan the same year I was born (in the United States) I didn't actually watch the TV series until almost three decades later. A large percentage of my life has been spent wishing that different forms of Japanese entertainment were also available in English. I would see little bits and pieces of art in magazines and books over the years, fantasizing about what the bigger picture was. You would do this with video games as well. I fantasized about so many Japanese games in the 90s and amazingly a few of them have actually come out here, long after their time had come and gone! Examples that spring to mind are Soul Hackers, the Innocent Sin half of Persona 2, and Front Mission. Even thought we don't get every cool looking Japanese game, Japanese animation and comic books are now everywhere.
Although I used to have a negative perspective about the whole issue of "interesting looking stuff forever staying in Japan", I now seriously believe this exercise in imagination helped my creativity! Because whatever I imagined was never what it ended up being, but I did imagine various possibilities. I would just sit and wonder what was the crazy stuff was behind all this crazy-looking stuff. Of course now we have the internet, so you can pretty much go from seeing a single image or screenshot to watching an episode of the show or playing the game. If nothing else you can at least get some information. There's very little room for speculation about this kind of stuff. The modern way of doing things is definitely better, don't get me wrong! I would rather know that speculate!
Anyway, back to Devilman. The basic idea of the show, which is laid out in the first episode if I remember correctly, the Devil asks three devils to fight to the death. One of the devils is Devilman. Since he is the hero of the show he wins, and gets sent to Earth in order to destroy it. But he falls in love with a human girl, and hilarity ensues. The Devil keeps sending devils to find out why Devilman hasn't destroyed the world yet, which results in a fight, and Devilman sends the Devil's devils back to hell. And I am pretty sure it was targeted towards the same age group as Speed Racer. It's an over the top and ridiculous story, and Go Nagai, the creator, is an amazing artist. He has created many iconic Japanese characters, such as Mazinger Z and Cutey Honey.
This model is based on a later version of Devilman, not the one from the 1972 series. That one is blue. I made a version of that one much later than this, and used a different template.
Old Devilman
New Devilman
I made tall versions of both the old and new Devilmen (?) for IILOVE , a great papercraft zine created by Yebo Maycu. There are nine issues, all free, available on his site. And all of them are very cool, with lots of exclusive models, including the two you see above on the cover I made for issue #3, as well as photos, illustrations and interviews. There is an interview with me in the same issue as the Devilguys!
So yeah, I hope Devilman is easy to build. I hope the various wings and where to put them make sense! And I hope you download every copy of IILOVE and click through them all at least once. And I hope you come back tomorrow for a new post of an old model!
This is "She Found Now" by My Bloody Valentine. It doesn't match up with the Devilman theme at all. It's just the last song I heard before I got off the bus today, and it put me in such a great mood.
