Maou Dante

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Mao Danta aka Demon Lord Dante is a rough draft of Go Nagai's later work being Devilman. This short series contains some similarities to the Devilman manga, however Mao Dante is a lot more controversial.

The story for this horror manga is centered on Ryo Utsugi, while in the mountains, hears a voice calling out to him being Demon Lord Dante who then devours Ryo. Moments later Dante wreaks havoc on a nearby city where Ryo awakens to discover that he has become Demon Lord Dante. The rest of the series focuses on events similar to The Salem Witch Trials where demons could be masquerading ... as humans.

Most of the appeal of this story is the atmosphere & its ending being controversial to certain religions, however the point of the story is to express the corruption of sacred ideologies as people shouldn't justify every sin for the sake of the greater good. While most of the story elements are better expressed in Devilman, Mao Dante has its own unique qualities.

For starters, the beginning of this manga is very reminiscent of a Kaiju film (Giant monster) where Dante battles a demon named Xenon in the city. The tone then shifts to a study of human society where the "heroic saviors" act just as cruel as their enemies. Much of the controversy comes from its final chapter as the series revolves around a religious group battling satanists. The last chapter can be misinterpreted as it makes the satanists being in the right side expressing demons are the righteous beings. Personally, I saw it more as an ironic look at human vices as it displays people being arrogant to their crimes of murder while they tend to justify their actions. Main problem with this manga is that it ends on a slight cliffhanger due to the magazine publisher going out of business. If you like this story, then you'll like Devilman a lot more.

To put it bluntly, Demon Lord Dante is one of the worst manga I've ever read. Nagai corrupts and bastardizes so many elements of western culture, merging them in ways that make little to no such and ultimately ruins any thematic cognizance of the piece. Much of the Judeo-Christian elements are simplified, and then remixed into something closer to Shintoism, without understanding what those themes were for in the first place. The framing of Sodom and Gomorrah as an apocalyptic future battle, the strange injection of the Himalayas which seems straight out of a 1960s over-hype about climbing the mountain, and especailly the incredibly poor ... use of Medusa, a greek figure, in a Judeo-Christian setting. These things are frankly jarring, and nearly unforgivable, and make for what is an almost unreadable work.

The art is not much better, as Nagai offers almost nothing of lasting imagination. Chief among them the way he portrays demons having almost not biological points of interest, something completely opposite to the way he ironically draws robots. His failure to really visually tell any tangible story is also a major point that holds back this story, as scenes of grandeur are really minimized by the overall placement and pacing. Perhaps this has to do with later versions changing things, but from what I can tell it is just in the poor storytelling and pacing of Nagai himself, and due to his terrible choices. The shear lack of artistic imagination is almost jarring compared to Nagai's other works.

Demon Lord Dante boils down to a bad Judeo-Christian Kaiju film, and that's without even mentioning the fact it's unfinished. Excusing that entirely, it is still nearly unintelligible from the very first page.

I could spend all day reeming into this pile of garbage, that's exactly how poor of a experience this was, but I won't because that's exactly how terrible this manga was to read. I do not want to spend anymore time on this thing. I'll finish off by saying this is the direct Prequel to landfills that are Berserk and Evangelion; that should give you a good idea of what you are dealing with in this manga. Every single thing wrong with those two works, but fileted and cooked well-done.

(NO SPOILER REVIEW)
You might have found this manga when looking into the Devilman universe and Go Nagai's works, that's how I found it. This review is based only on Maou Dante, as I haven't read any other work by Nagai. I you don't want to read this looong review, skip to the end where I give my final thoughts.

STORY: A really different story to what you might've ever seen. This is a short story, you can find various versions with different amount of volumes, but they're all (mostly) the same. I will explain why "mostly" in the art section. A controversial plot for it's ... time, Go Nagai portrays a different angle between the battle of "Good and Evil". While the story is interesting, certain aspects of the plot are pretty goofy, and it might be hard for you to take it as seriously as the manga portrays it. Also, like most of Nagai works (which I haven't read, but know of), this is full of gruesome deaths and blood everywhere. BE AWARE, this manga doesn't have an ending.

ART: I'm not a fan of Nagai's artstyle. It might have been okay in the 70's, but today it's really hard to like it if you don't look at it retroactively or with an open mind. The strongest point of this manga's artwork is by far, the backgrounds and the giant monsters, which are full to the brim with detail. The weakest point is,of course, the character designs and overall style. Horrible aesthetic plus a laughable anatomy, even for a product of it's time, anatomy as bad as this one shouldn't have been okay.
There are different versions of this manga by different publishers that vary between the amount of pages and volumes, but they're not different enough to be dissatisfied with if you read a "lesser" version. The 2 volume version is the original, while the 3 volume version has some colored pages, some entirely new pages it also takes away a few pages entirely, not many, maybe like 4 or 5) and fixed character designs. By "fixed" I mean that Nagai redrew some panels that looked terrible on the original, like character expressions, clothes, shading and anatomy. I read both versions, and this fixes are more than welcome.

CHARACTER: I have no positives or negatives when it comes to the characters, none of them get enough development in the span of 2 volumes to make an opinion off.

ENJOYMENT & Overall Opinion: A short and easy to read manga that presents an interesting story (Albeit, a little bit boring in my opinion) with a subpar artstyle that is only good in the "kaiju battles" and the backgrounds. Would only recommend it if you plan on reading the entire universe of Devilman mangas, considering "Maou Dante" as a proto-Devilman story.
There's a Remake of this called "NEO MAOU DANTE" with better art and an actual ending, considering this version doesn't have a proper ending at all. I recommend reading Maou Dante before going for Neo Maou Dante.