If you liked
Berserk
|
...then you might like
Devilman
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It's almost impossible to find any author that inspired Kentaro Miura (and with him generations of authors that chose to explore and represent the most obscure and cruel parts of human emotions) more than Go Nagai and his masterpiece, Devilman. It will be simple for any Berserk fan to immediately recognize the first systematic use of all those beautiful narrative and visual tropes that makes these kind of stories so interesting: the dark and oppressive atmosphere and aesthetic, the entire story centered around the complex relationship between two main characters, which are presented as similar opposites starting from the chara design (protagonist with a darker appearance and deuteragonist with a lighter one, each being both directly and inversely specular to themselves), a magistral depiction of nightmarish and horrorific scenes, the thematization of the struggle to cohexistence, the violence and curelty of humanity when in fear, the struggle for the survival of the fittest and its consequences, all conveyed through scenes of gore and perversion that may seem as self-purposing at first but are needed to immerse the reader in the rotten world the author create upon us. And one of probably the best ending in the history of manga. If you try to get over the dated style and sometimes kinda uncertain proportions (that completely disappear when Nagai move from depicting slice-of-life scenes to showing the horror that is the core of the story, here any remaining graphical problems get obscured by its magistral use of colors and images to communicate despair and anguish) and some naivety in the dialogues at first it will probably give you, especially in the last two volumes, one of the most beautiful and heart-crushing reading of your life