In addition to the return of Aira Mu from God Mazinger, the main source for this chapter comes from King Bomber (1976). As best as I can tell it involved teen drummer Shingo Hibiki who merges with the golden African statue, King Bomber to defeat his enemies. It’s probably a lot more complicated than that, the villain here seems named after a civilisation that King Bomber had destroyed earlier in history in his own manga.

Really simple to sum up this time, as Jack is barely in it, and that means we don’t get lengthy speeches or random shaming of the Slum King to confuse matters. The androgynous, abused, frequently naked, blonde waif Shingo Hibiki wanders into a jungle full of wild animals that escaped the zoo after the Great Kanto Earthquake.

Meanwhile, we meet the villain of the piece, Kibara. Who is, of course, an evil zoo keeper wearing a crocodile’s head as a hat. He’s trained animals to kill man, and is upset that strangers have arrived in his jungle. Not Shingo, but Aira Mu and her followers. Who, Shingo happens to come across when both decide to bathe at the same time. Aira almost comes a cropper at the hands of a wild tiger, but Shingo’s innate animal empathy saves her.

He returns with her to her settlement, where they have made a wooden statue of their saviour, Violence Jack that they call King Bomber. Kibara meanwhile is tearing through the forest hunting for Aira Mu. Sensing danger, Jack turns into his phoenix form and flies off.

If only his danger sense was a little more prompt…

The village is massacred and the survivors taken to Kibara’s camp to be tortured. Shingo was left behind and plead for the statue of King Bomber to rescue Aira. At which point Jack arrives and the pair merge into the statue, and Jack raises the tiger Shingo befriended from the dead (though it appears he’s just putting part of his essence into it’s body).

And the pair go and rescue Aira in the bloodiest way possible.

Unfortunately, the chapter seems to run out of pages and the final fight between Jack and Kibara happens off panel. All we get is Aira discovering Kibara dead, and Shingo lying in the broken shards of the King Bomber statue. A disappointing ending considering some of the sequences of carnage that other chapters have had.

Thankfully the next chapter is perhaps my favourite and full of some utterly genius moments of (re-)invention

Related posts:

1. Violence Jack – Black Forest
2. Violence Jack – Hell City Kanto
3. Violence Jack – Golden City

Back to the Jack we go.

I’d been putting off talking about this, as frankly I don’t think I’ve much to talk about. The guest characters this time round are from 1969’s Gakuen Bangaichi, his first professional collaboration with Ken Ishikawa (though Ishikawa had assisted on earlier manga).

So thoroughly neglected is the title, that it doesn’t have a Japanese wikipedia page, let alone much information in English. ebookjapan.jp doesn’t have it either so I can’t get information from there. The best I can tell is it was another tale of school debauchery. Most references in Japanese are either to this chapter of Violence Jack or to auctions of the two 70s editions of the manga. Shame.

If someone who can actually read Japanese wants to explain better, the indespensible Mazingerz.com has a little information. In the meantime here are the meandering thoughts of someone who likes to blunder through and jump to his own conclusions based on the art alone.

Once again VJ avoids formula by focusing for a change on Kid Violence Jack, and to a lesser extent Lady Violence Jack. Kid Violence Jack shows up at a school house in the middle of nowhere, where a bunch of kids and hoodlums are having lessons. He joins the class, but the lessons are disturbed when the Terrence Stamp looking dude from the Dragon Fort arc shows up.

Meanwhile, Lady Violence Jack has troubles of her own as she runs into one of the Slum King’s thugs at the beach while she’s buck naked. She easily disposes of him, but is blind-sided by a second, snorkelling, thug. Who then proceeds to make the worst move a snorkelling thug who has just blind-sided a naked female Violence Jack could make. He decides he’ll try and rape her.

Bad move.

Back at the school, Terrence Stamp has had similar thoughts regarding the one adult female there. Of course, the murder of a child wasn’t enough to get Kid Violence Jack into belated action, but this is, and Terrence Stamp learns you don’t bring a sword to a knife fight.

During all this we’ve been seeing troop movements from the Slum King and the arc ends with yet another huge dust up between Jack and the Slum King’s army. Of course Jack doesn’t kill the Slum King, instead once again humiliating him by removing his mask. Along with plenty of scenes establishing that the three aspects of Jack make a whole, this may be foreshadowing that Slum King is not whole in a way that goes beyond his missing face.

Not a great arc, nothing particularly novel is done with the guest character(s), but at the same time it’s not going anywhere mind blowingly weird like that first Susano-OH related arc. Weird sexual stuff is also low compared to some arcs (like the next arc), but it does end with an odd sequence where the girl who Kid Violence Jack “saved” earlier dances naked in the rain before dressing like a “proper” Japanese school girl rather than the weird sixties gangsters moll she was dressed as before. Strangely puritanical vibe (“don’t dress slutty or you’ll get raped”) which seems oddly out of place given the excesses of the strip in general.

Related posts:

1. Violence Jack – Black Forest
2. Violence Jack – Gekitou! Mondo
3. Violence Jack – Death Police

The main strip that’s getting referenced here is Iron Muscle, an early 80s series from Dynamic Pro that’s a lot of fun. It’s in the future sport genre, with the sport being Giant Robot Wrestling. That is to say, Giant Robot’s wrestling each other, not men wrestling Giant Robots.

Kouichi Hagane’s father was killed in a bout with Wilhelm Odin, and Kouchi takes his place in the ring. The first arc deals with Kouichi’s revenge on Odin, while the second is a tournament arc, with a guest appearance from Boss Borot! Maybe because it didn’t hang around long enough, but it doesn’t descend into Nagai’s apocalyptic tendencies, in fact it gets lighter as it progresses. Kouichi, Odin and Sakura, the muscular female grappler from the second arc all show up in this arc.

Odin is yet another androgynous blonde pretty boy, which handily allows him to also fill in the role of Susano-OH’s androgynous villain and leader of his/her band of mutants, monsters and miscreants. Susano himself finally appears, fully corrupted by his demonic side and aligned with the villains from his strip. Also appearing from Susano-OH is Ryoko, his sister (a minor character in the original) who we saw in the first arc of the revived Violence Jack series, Dragon Fort.

Also popping along are Gakuen Taikutsu Otoko’s Mondo and Tatsuma once again. While not playing that big a role here, they do attempt to tidy up the fact that they had died in an earlier arc. And subsequently got better. Though as I can’t read much Japanese, I have no idea how they tidy it up, but the art clearly shows Tatsuma remembering Mondo’s death in the Bazooka duel in Golden City.

This arc takes place in Aquapolis, a city that seems to have survived the worst of the Great Kanto Earthquake, but has become terribly corrupt with various man on man bloodsports taking place, the main one being an ultraviolent form of wrestling. Like all ultraviolent future sports, spikes are involved.

Heading to the city are Mondo, Tatsuma, the aforementioned Sakura and Kouichi, and of course, Violence Jack. On the way Kouichi tests his strength against Jack and becomes possessed with some of Jack’s power (Lady Violence Jack and Kid Violence Jack appear to be similar extensions of Jack’s power).

Meanwhile we see the city is being controlled by a three horned demon who sits on throne of naked women. Up until now we’ve had a few cosmic and supernatural elements, but this is our first out and out indication that it goes beyond Jack himself. This is Susano-OH, his form here is based on one of his earlier demonic forms that resembles Zenon from Devilman more than the later forms he takes when the book veers into the post apocalypse craziness that goes several steps further than Violence Jack in terms of scope.

Kouichi, like in Iron Muscle is searching for Odin, but he and Sakura end up entangled in Susano-Oh’s machinations. The pair, along with Mondo and Tatsuma, find themselves attacked by the gang from Susano-OH’s pre-apocalypse chapters. Meanwhile, Violence Jack, currently Godzilla-sized arrives. This leads Susano-OH to absorb power from the city and grow to similar size and between the two of them their battle sinks the town.

The only other survivors are Tatsuma, Mondo, Ryoko, Kouichi, Sakura and Odin. In fact it’s questionable if the other people in the city were real and not just creations of Susano. Kouichi and Odin don their wrestling armour and duel, a mirror of the still ensuing fight between Jack and Susano. Whereas Kouichi breaks Odin’s neck, Jack drives out the supernatual forces from Susano, returning him to the mortal form of Susa Shingo.

We then get some happy endings as Susa is reunited with his sister and Kouichi with his father, who turns out to be a man swathed in bandages we’ve seen periodically through the chapter. That’s a little confusing, as there’s another man swathed in bandages in Susano’s gang of henchmen. Oddly his dad doesn’t really look like he did in Iron Muscle or indeed when we see him dying at Odin’s hands earlier in the arc. Instead he’s seemingly aged into looking more like a Kenzo Kabuto type dad. Though as his dad was a cyborg in Iron Muscle that might explain the difference.

At this point, it’s now really difficult to marry that first Violence Jack arc with what we have now. He’s gone from the tall, silent, mysterious berserk killer of that first arc, to this chatty, supernatural force that can split into three, imbue people with his power, grow to the size of buildings, raise the dead and basically do whatever the plot requires (except save people before they are tortured). Later arcs, as we shall see, tone it back down again, and you sometimes wonder why Jack in those arcs can’t just pull out the crazy stuff he does here. The Slave Farm arc in particular springs to mind as being a really big disconnect between Jack’s portrayals.

The fun is in the audacity of Nagai’s plots and ideas, and in the “star system” he’s using to recycle concepts. I don’t think Susano-OH had been finished at this point, it had gotten cancelled/gone on hiatus, and it’s possible this was intended to wrap it up in lieu of an actual ending. Susano-OH would eventually return following the popularity of the novelisations by Go Nagai’s brother Yasutaka Nagai, and get that insane apocalyptic ending that feels like Violence Jack by H.R. Giger.

The gratuitous violence and torture feels a little toned down here. People impaled on spiked helmets, faces being pulled off and a human dartboard are about the extent of it. The one sex scene here is drawn like they are participating in some kind of magical ceremony, really amping up the metaphor as I mentioned in earlier posts. It works really well, and this is certainly the best Weekly Manga Goraku arc so far in terms of art, with nice composition, panel layouts and cartoon reactions.

Related posts:

1. Violence Jack – Death Police
2. Violence Jack – Golden City
3. Violence Jack – Dragon Wind

The Violence Jack image is the from the end of Golden City, the arc that includes Tsubasa Nishikori. Who has been cast in pretty much the central role in Shin Mazinger. Imagawa on a Violence Jack TV series would be my dream anime right now.

Related posts:

1. Tsubasa Nishikiori
2. Violence Jack – Golden City
3. Best Anime of the 00s: Shin Mazinger Shougeki! Z Hen (2009)

Despite their apparent deaths years back, Mondo and Tatsuma from Gakuen Taikutsu Otoko are back as the lead characters again.

Also showing up – that blonde haired girl from Harenchi Gakuen. The girl who isn’t secretly a ninja. You know, the one who is the template for characters like Gamia Q from Mazinger amongst many, many other Nagai heroines with the same haircut. For the life of me I can’t find any reference to her in English so I’m stumped on her name. More on Harenchi Gakuen later when we get to the arc that deals with the main characters from that strip.

And apparently there’s some Mao Dante stuff in here too, though I’ll be damned if I can find it!

Once again, as seems to be the way with Mondo & Tatsuma, this story takes all sorts of twists and turns, and could do with translating. Particularly as this is the first arc where the lady Violence Jack plays a significant part in the action. So take all this with a pinch of salt.

Mondo & Tatsuma find themselves once more caught between various factions. This time it’s a corrupt police force who are in league with a biker gang and the armies of the Slum King. They are arrested and taken to where the police enjoy torturing folks. Here they meet a dude with a scar on his face, who may be the chief in Mao Dante at a stretch, but I’m not sure. Oh and the girl from Harenchi Gakuen, who the scar faced guy is interrogating. The guys beat up their captors, steal the weapons and free the girl, with the pair taking their time to dress up as cops on the way.

Elsewhere we see Lady Violence Jack swing into town and get into a brawl at the local saloon. And the aforementioned biker gang is engaging the army of the Slum King. The gang are led by this big dude.

Learning that he’s now fighting on two fronts – Slum King on one side, Lady Violence Jack, Mondo & Tatsuma on the other, he returns to town and faces off with the femme-Jack. His gang persue her, only to run into Violence Jack himself!

In the meantime though, our heroes have got caught again, and so are tied up naked and whipped. Bondage is still equal opportunity in Go Nagai’s world! Eventually the Slum King’s army attacks the town and Mondo & Tatsuma convince the corrupt cops to let them out so they can help fight the army.

In the middle of the war, Jack and the biker gang leader face off in a fight that takes on a mystical element the pair becoming giants that fill the sky in a cosmic battle. All very Jim Starlin.

Needless to say, I have no idea what’s going on here. Then a berserk Jack attacks Mondo once again, this time just knocking him out.

This may be the first of the seinen era arcs that feels like the 70s material. This is mainly down to the shock material being kept to a minimum. It’s closer to the late 70s material though, while there’s some fantastic cosmic scenes like the one above, it doesn’t approach the pure cartooning energy of prime Nagai. In terms of understanding the overall series, this is one that could really use translating over the two gorey arcs we’ve had scanlated and the more recent strips.

NEXT! Iron Muscle! And the end of that Susano-OH storyline from the Dragon Fort chapter!

Related posts:

1. Violence Jack – Golden City
2. Violence Jack – Gekitou! Mondo
3. Violence Jack – Gakuen Bangaichi

Well this has been sitting on my PC for ages, so I suppose I ought to post it.

This was adapted into the Evil Town OAV, which makes sense as it’s a fairly stand alone arc, I think it only ties into one later arc (Beast King) and that’s only by sharing some characters. Luckily this arc has been scanlated so I can properly tell what’s going on, though ironically this is probably one where it’s least needed.

The character this arc shares with Beast King is Aira Mu, who is the first imported character for this arc. She is from God Mazinger, Go Nagai’s Mazinger flavoured take on Daimajin. The TV version can be considered a failure, getting cancelled before it completed it’s tale. There is however the manga version which is complete, as well as novelisations. Considering what a massive snooze its theme is, the failure of the anime comes as no surprise.

Aila here resembles her manga incarnation, a traditional Nagai heroine rather than the Satoshi Hirayama designed red-headed appearance she had in the anime.

The second imported character is Ricki, the former female pro-wrestler and sidekick/protector of Jiro Shutendo in Shuten-Doji (1976-78). She features in the sections before it goes completely insane with time-slips, spaceships and cyborgs.

Here she is in Violence Jack in one of the rare panels where she isn’t topless pickaxing.

And here she is in Shuten-Doji:

This arc deals with an underground city/shopping centre built under Tokyo that has been cut off from the outside world by the Great Kanto Earthquake. It’s now home to three factions: Area A – the everyman group, Area B – gangsters and Area C – fashion models. Well it is a Go Nagai comic, after all.

So the group from Area A dig up Jack (I don’t know why he’s buried), but Area C offer him riches to come and protect them from Areas A & B, who they quite rightly fear will rape them. Jack agrees, and without his protection Area B raids Area A. The survivors flee to Area C, before Area B sets their sights on that area too.

However Area C have been working on an escape tunnel, and with Jack and the remaining men from Area A offereing to hold off Area B, the women flee into the tunnels. Of course this being Violence Jack, that’s not enough, and they end up getting attacked by men from Area B. Well, men and one transexual, who dresses like a droog from Clockwork Orange. This Blue, yet another sexually ambiguous Go Nagai villain.

From an artistic point of view we start to see a technique here where visual metaphor is used to represent the rape of the women, with the men of Area B turning into wolf men. As the series progresses the sexual content is more and more represented in abstract ways, and I’m curious if that was from some sort of backlash or editorial decree. It doesn’t really work here, coming across silly rather than horrifying, but later attempts really amp up the horror aspect. Also these sort of hallucinatory scenes eventually have a part to play in the final arcs as, yes, things actually begin to tie together.

Anyway, Jack does his Sandman run in for the day and kills Blue, mid-rape. Blue’s boyfriend, Mad Saurus, the leader of Area B, finds Blue’s decapitated head and in what is probably the most disgusting part of the arc, eats Blue, so they can be together forever.

Then, with the women safely outside, Jack waits at the cave entrance and tells Saurus to return to Hell City or face death. Naturally Saurus isn’t having this and so must have the stabbing done to him.

Ultimately an unenthralling arc. The use of Aira Mu isn’t particularly interesting, and the art is lacking compared to the 70’s chapters and to future installments. Not having read/seen God Mazinger I can’t confirm or deny that Aira Mu’s dullness is due to her origins. However, more feisty Nagai heroines seem to get to keep their feistiness fairly intact when transfering to Violence Jack – Jun Hono we’ve seen already and Cutey Honey plays a major role later on, so maybe Aira was useless to begin with.

Related posts:

1. Violence Jack – Kanto Slum Chapter
2. Violence Jack – Golden City
3. Violence Jack – Kanto Sumo Oni

Well I’ve been putting off writing about this for a while now, so let’s get this over and done with as briefly as possible.

This is one of the arcs that is likely what people have in mind when they say the Violence Jack manga is more offensive than the OAVs. Because this arc is. And what makes it worse, is that the really offensive portion doesn’t really have anything to do with story at hand. It’s just there to shock, which it definitely does, to the point of disgust.

The actual arc involves a flashback to the Slum King growing up pre-Earthquake. We see him being born, not so much a birth as a monster bursting from his mother’s womb. Such is his violent nature from birth his family have him chained up (wearing samurai armour for some reason) in a shed.

He falls in love with the woman his family appear to be paying to strip naked and dance in front of him (I mentioned last time how these later stories are much harder to follow without Japanese reading skills than the 70s material didn’t I?). However there’s a jealous suitor, and when the Slum King is freed he finds the pair together (the man is possibly raping her – he has forced himself on her once at this point, but it’s not clear from the art if that’s the case this second time) and he kills him. But in his rage, Slum King ends up killing her too.

I’m doing that whole sequence a disservice, as the strip does a decent job just by the illustrations in illiciting some sympathy for the Slum King, before spitting it in your face and reminding you what a bully and monster he actually is. That may also be the point of the aforementioned offensiveness, but it was a little unsubtle if that was the intention.

That indeed is the final payoff of this arc, as in the future, Jack and Slum King battle, and Jack appears to cause Slum King to hallucinate this woman that he loved and killed, leaving the tyrant pathetically crying on the battle.

No noticable cross refencing to other Nagai works here. The only other note to make is that as we’ll learn later on, the events in the Slum King’s flashback probably never happened.

So all in all not great and two arcs in you’re kind of wondering what happened to the Violence Jack familiar from the 70s. The next arc doesn’t really help matters either…

Related posts:

1. Violence Jack – Gakuen Bangaichi
2. Violence Jack – Death Police
3. Violence Jack – Golden City

So in 1983, Violence Jack returned this time in the pages of Weekly Manga Goraku. Now with an audience of adult males rather than teenagers, we start to get the Violence Jack that people might have in mind when the name is mentioned.

Well kind of.

While the violence and sexual content is amped up, the metaphysical, mystical elements are too. And the usage of other Nagai characters and concepts runs riot. As I’ve stated before, that’s something that gets overlooked in the reputation the title has earnt from the OAVs alone.

This particular chapter brings in elements of his Susano OH series. We’ll see them more explicitly used in the fifth arc of the revival – “Hyper Grapple“. There seems to be very little information on Susano OH’s actual storyline in English. The best I can tell is that it starts as a story about super-powered school hoodlums, before turning into another variation on Devilman, complete with a blonde sexually ambiguous friend/enemy. Though there’s also a great deal of Mao Dante in there too.

Then it turns into something so mind bogglingly strange it strained my brain trying to take it all in. Imagine if HP Lovecraft was a big Saint Seiya fan and took over the Conan franchise after Robert E Howard killed himself. It’s something a bit like that, but with a spaceship. And it totally needs translating as its apocalypse outdoes Devilman’s and Jack’s in terms of sheer strangeness. Like if HR Giger had been the art director on Hell Comes To Frog Town.

Back to the sexual content.

In many ways, the 70s incarnation of Violence Jack wasn’t all that far removed the Shameless School and the like in terms of its sexual content. It felt like an extension of the horny teenagers and corporal punishment obsessed teachers in the way the would-be assailants seemed more interested in stripping people and tying them up rather than actual intercourse.

So Dragon Fort makes up for it with a sex scene straight out the gate (after a quick recap of the whole Earthquake thing. Compare that to the lengthy disaster recaps that would be used to open arcs in the 70s). There’s nothing overly offensive yet.

Storywise, not much makes sense to me here, and the story seems to cheat with an “it was all a dream” ending. It excuses the eviscerating of two characters by the Slum King by making it some kind of psychic episode involving Jack and a girl he rescues who has some connection to Susano-OH, and leaves the pair perfectly OK despite one having had all their extremities sliced off and the other having had their intestines fall out.

Artwise, it’s very clear that it’s more of a Go Nagai AND Dynamic Productions work than ever before, as the eponymous fort is drawn with a detail that makes it look like it comes from a different world to the characters.

Oh and let’s not forget that Terrence Stamp shows up.

This General Zod looking chap will appear again later, despite getting his head torn off by a psychic whirlwind in this story.

And, finally, it is definitely worth noting that the following occurs:

Related posts:

1. Violence Jack – Gakuen Bangaichi
2. Violence Jack – Hyper Grapple
3. Violence Jack – Dragon Wind

Remember how Mondo and Tatsuma got gruesomely killed in the last arc? Well we open with them alive and well and wandering through the wilderness once more, as they glimpse a great dragon cleave through the land.

Way, way back, early on we had Violence Jack superimposed with a lion over him, well this dragon is actually the Slum King’s cavalry that is charging across Japan murdering and a pillaging as they go. We see a unit of them terrorise a village, before Jack appears and starts laying waste to them (of course not before the villains have beheaded a few innocent civilians themselves!). Seeing this the leader of the charge decides to break out the heavy weapons and they managed to slow Jack down with a barrage of missile fire before fleeing.

The injured Jack is rescued by Jun Hono, who luckily now has a sidecar attached to her motorcycle that will accomodate a 10 foot tall killing machine!

However they are followed and Jun ends up gunned down, which leads to another strange sequence similiar to the one that Mondo and Tatsuma went through, however here it appears the same powers that were used to make those hoodlums relive the Earthquake, heal Jun and she’s reborn in a peaceful park surrounded by a sheer cliff face.

Having managed to really get on Jack’s bad side, Jack proceeds to kill the remaining members of the cavalry charge. When the full force of the cavalry attacks hits Jack, the art shifts to show a giant Jack fighting a giant dragon. This shift in visuals is something that happens again and again when the series restarts in the 80s, eventually becoming a plot point one of the arcs. But more on that in later posts!

This is an odd ending to the 70s run, especially after an arc that feels more like a finality. It’s more upbeat that Golden City, in that Jun gets to live in some kind of paradise (heaven?) after her death as opposed to the ignoble ends Mondo and Tatsuma met. At the same time there’s still lot of dangling threads.

NEXT: Violence Jack returns in the 1980s. Guest starring Terrence Stamp!

Related posts:

1. Violence Jack – Hell’s Wind
2. Violence Jack – Golden City
3. Violence Jack – Death Police

For those watching Shin Mazinger, you may find the combination of gangsters + bath house rather familiar. Well that’ll be because Imagawa has borrowed them from Violence Jack. The leader, Tsubasa Nishikori, the bath house and her henchmen all come straight out of the Golden City arc of Violence Jack.

Here she is in Violence Jack:

And here she is in Shin Mazinger:

As best I can tell, the remainder of the arc involves various factions trying to get their hands on a safe full of gold bullion. The whole thing is a little to exposition heavy to understand just through the artwork. For instance, why is Jack apparently in league with the remnants of the Japanese army? What do Jack and the Female Jack talk about? Why is the Female Jack spying on the Slum King? Why does Slum King decide to send his army after Jack in the final pages?

Anyway, back to the stuff I can follow, Jack gets to the bullion, only to find Ryou Takama, the hero from the first two stories already in the process of stealing it.

He lets the young rebel take the gold and waits. Eventually, after various crosses and double crosses, Mondo, Tatsuma, and the gangsters arrive at the safe. This leads to a bazookas at ten paces duel between Mondo and Jack. Both take direct hits, but unfortunately for Mondo, only one of them is Violence Jack.

The gangsters then attack Jack, which goes about as well as you’d expect.

After despatching of all but Tatsuma, who is left holding Mondo’s remains and crying, the Slum King’s army arrive to put the hurting on our hero. With Jack severely wounded, Slum King faces him in one on one combat, first cutting his arm off, then stabbing him in the chest, before finally attempting to behead his enemy. Which leads to this ridiculously awesome panel!

After breaking Slum King’s sword with his teeth, Jack single handedly beats down the despot, punching him so hard it sets off another earthquake, crushing Slum King, his army, and Tatsuma. Only one man remains, Violence Jack. And we end with him walking into the sunset, arm in teeth.

The final battle sequences are awesome, positively bursting with manic energy.

And then Go Nagai seems to go and ignore this arc in all later arcs! In fact as soon as the next arc starts, Mondo and Tatsuma are alive once more. It made me wonder if this arc actually did come at this point, given that mazingerz.com doesn’t seem to have original release dates for it, but all other evidence indicates that it does fall between the Gekitou! Mondo and Dragon Wind arcs.

I’m thinking this arc may have run in Weekly Shonen Magazine, while the other arcs at the time ran in Monthly Shonen Magazine. I say this because it looks like between Gekitou! Mondo and Dragon Wind, “Go Nagai Festival” ran for three months in Monthly Shonen Magazine in place of Violence Jack.

Elements of this arc play out in later arcs, in fact the next arc, Dragon Wind, feels like a fresh take on the final sequences between Jack and Slum King’s army, without the confrontation with Slum King himself. Given the themes of death and rebirth that start to become more explicit as the series progresses, it’s possible we can put all this down to the hell Jack puts Mondo and Tatsuma through in the last arc. Or that Jack (or someone else…) simply ressurected them. Either way, it’s perhaps the most confusing arc of the series.

Particularly as the gold bullion reappears in the epilogue to the series as a whole, and I can’t remember it’s recovery being dealt with again.

Never mind!

A couple of other notes arising from this chapter. First of all, this is where we get to see why Slum King always wears a mask – he doesn’t have a face of his own! I believe this gets explained in couple of arcs time, and then the metaphysical reason is revealed much later.

And talking of faces, this arc we see Mondo take on the devilish face that Nagai gives a lot of his characters, most famously Akira Fudo of Devilman fame. With Violence Jack meeting so many of these other characters who share some facial similarities to himself it takes on a whole different feeling than just being an expression of emotion (especially once you read the series grand finale).

It’s something that’s obviously hasn’t been lost on Yasuhiro Imagawa in his Shin Mazinger series, who not only has Koji Kabuto drawn in that style on occasion, but draws the connection between Mazinger Z and Mao Dante that’s kind of always been there bubbling beneath the surface (both feature a teenager controling a giant from inside the giant’s head). Not to mention using Z Mazinger’s Zeus, whose design has traits of both Violence Jack and Devilman in it.

Related posts:

1. Violence Jack – Death Police
2. Violence Jack – Black Forest
3. Violence Jack – Gakuen Bangaichi

This and the following arc, Golden City, are frankly far more complicated than my lack of Japanese language skills allow me to fully comprehend. However, I’m not even sure being able to read the language would fully explain some of what goes on here. Particularly as Go Nagai himself seems to pretend some of what happens in these arcs didn’t actually happen.

The guest stars here are the two leads from Gakuen Taikutsu Otoko aka “The Most Boring Guy In School” aka “Guerilla High“. It ran in 1970 and picks up some themes from Harenchi Gakuen (“Shameless School”), but places more focus on the violence and is both a satire on student uprisings and on Nagai’s own experience with the PTA protests at Shameless School (though that book itself does that far better).

The first volume plays out like a western, the remaining like a horror film. The “hero”, Mondo feels like a prototype Akira Fudo or Violence Jack, and visually Nagai draws on that particularly in the next arc. He also resembles the character Ryoma from Getter Robo, which is unlikely to be a coincidence as Ken Ishikawa was reportedly heavily involved with Gakuen Taikutsu Otoko too.

The other character pulled from that series is a character called Tatsuma. Arguably this could be seen as a precursor to Ryo in Devilman, being the androgynous male sidekick/rival of the hero. However Tatsuma takes his androgyny a few steps further, being introduced as a girl and basically being a Nagai heroine’s head on a male body.

In Violence Jack they are similarly a couple of would be revolutionaries who pre-Earthquake appear to be planning some sort of armed uprising. During the Earthquake they had somehow been arrested and locked up in prison (this is the first time we see that there is some sort of organised civilisation still in Japan beyond the Slum King’s domain).

They escape, have a tussle with some gangsters who they dispatch despite being handcuffed, then run into Violence Jack who frees them from their cuffs. AND IT’S RIGHT ABOUT HERE I START GETTING LOST.

They get into an argument, Jack beats them up, ties them up (here’s your bondage for this chapter folks) and drags them through the wasteland. They wake up in what appears to be pre-Earthquake Japan, then things start going all Golden Age Spectre on them as they are forced to relive the Earthquake over and over again, until finally…

Those are just three pages out of an amazing sequence where they appear to be confronted by the souls of those whose deaths they’d been indirectly responsible during their revolutionary days. It’s fantastic stuff.

Taught their lesson (or are they?), they find themselves back in the real world and wander off into the sunset. Cut to what is the start of the most puzzling aspect of Violence Jack for me:

Yes, THREE Violence Jacks. The one we all know and love. A Lady Violence Jack and a Kid Violence Jack. WHAT IS GOING ON?!? Seriously, if anyone can explain the deal with the other Jacks I’d love to know. I can follow all the stuff with Ryo, Maki, Slum King and so forth and how that ties to Devilman, but this bewilders and befuddles me.

Up until now, Jack has been kind of a giant tough guy, here though he clearly has supernatural powers and that’s an important shift in the story. Occasionally we will see him portrayed more like a mortal, but there’s a lot of future stories where he is portrayed with this power.

Actually in retrospect, outside of the argument Mondo and Tatsuma have with Jack and the dialogue between the Jacks on the last few pages that wasn’t too confusing. Let’s see what Golden City holds though…

Related posts:

1. Violence Jack – Death Police
2. Violence Jack – Golden City
3. Violence Jack – Downfallen Tokyo Chapter

Violence. Sadism. Nudity. And full on, gratuitous… references to other Go Nagai properties.

Pictured above is our heroine for this chapter, who Great Mazinger fans may recognise as Jun Hono, the female lead from that series. Her boyfriend we see in the flashback to pre-Earthquake times is Tetsuya Tsurugi, Great Mazinger’s hero and pilot. Jun Hono also gets the “re-imagining” treatment again Mazinger Angels, Nagai and Akihiko Nina’s mecha parody of Charlie’s Angels starring the female leads from Mazinger Z, Great Mazinger and Grandizer.

Also, according to wikipedia, there are also references to Mao Dante. Those are harder to place, certainly compared to the more obvious use of Mao Dante we shall see in the 80’s run. Possibly the Hell’s Wind biker gang are supposed to be the commandos who attack the sacrifice that summons Dante? Is the teacher character based on Saori, Mao Dante’s female lead? If anyone can clear that up for me, that’d be great. The only thing I’m certain of is that the lead biker has a Mao Dante-esque design painted on his helmet.

Something I forgot to mention in the last chapter is there’s another element of storytelling that appears in these late 70s stories that wasn’t really there in the early 70s stories. Namely, what wrestling nerds might call the “SANDMAN RUN-IN”. That’s  reference to the ECW wrestler who’d make run-ins to save various babyfaces, but because he’d take so long to get to the ring, the heels would invariably be able to beat up the people he was trying to save for about more five minutes.

Violence Jack pretty much does this all the time from here on out. There’s always plenty of time for the villains to do something horrible to someone who doesn’t deserve it before Jack shows up to save them.

The story starts pre-Great Kanto Earthquake where we see our heroine for this chapter, Jun Hono out on a date with Tetsuya Tsurugi, when they are chased by the eponymous biker gang “Hell’s Wind”, causing them to have a crash that kills Tetsuya.

Then later while out riding her own motorcycle, the Earthquake hits, and we get a great sequence of Jun trying to outrace nature. The cartooning here is back to Nagai’s best, it’s hard to believe that the same artist drew this arc as the last. Skip to “now”, where we meet a scarred and tough Jun, still riding her bike, now through the wasteland of post-Earthquake Japan.

Then we get to meet this chapter’s victims!

A peaceful village, and in particular the local teacher. In spite of the apocalyptic landscape, the village is fairly serene, a long way from the Slum King’s Kanto Slums of the second story. Well until the bikers show up and start murdering folks before taking a bunch of hostages.

Jun then makes her Sandman run-in and starts to kill the bikers in return, first by arrows tipped with dynamite, then by machine gun and finally by revolvers, which for some reason requires Jun to take her top off before she can unholster. I’m sure that was entirely necessary. Jack also shows up, but fares worse than Jun, getting lanced in the chest by the gang leader, before being gunned down and left for dead.

The remaining bikers flee, but take the village teacher hostage. Jack’s recuperating, so Jun chases after them, only to get caught herself. Which leads to this chapter’s bondage scene. You know I might be jumping to conclusions, but I get the feeling Go Nagai really likes bondage, after all even Mazinger found itself tied to a crucifix at one point. This scene edges up the risque nature of the series, but there’s still none of the explicity sexual content associated with the name Violence Jack.

Of course, before the villains can do anything truly evil to our heroines, the villagers drag Jack to the bikers camp and the inevitable happens.

This is one of the stories that was adapted into an OAV. The anime loses a lot of the Nagai character design charm, and ups the sexual violence. However there’s another change which bothered me more than the mutilation and abuse that Jun suffers, and that’s the villagers blaming her, to her face, for increasing the carnage the biker gang caused by fighting back. That’s not a scene that appears in the manga, and she manages to extract some degree of revenge for Tetsuya and the village before getting captured. She definitely comes across stronger as a heroine in the manga, whereas she feels more like a victim in the anime.

The art was much improved in this story over the last, with some inspired layouts and a lot of personality to the villagers and the bikers. It’s worth noting that despite it’s resemblance to Mad Max, this particular story started in 1977, two years before Mad Max was released. More likely they were both tapping into the trend of revenge fiction popular in the 70s (this and the last story play much more like revenge tales compared to the first two), along with a degree of influence from westerns (and in the case of Violence Jack, samurai fiction).

Finally, this isn’t the last we shall see of Jun, she appears again the 7th story and she may appear again as another character in the 80’s incarnation, but more on that later when we get to the most confusing aspect of the series for me. OK I just re-read the next two stories. It starts to get confusing in the next chapter.

Related posts:

1. Violence Jack – Dragon Wind
2. Violence Jack – Death Police
3. Violence Jack – Hell City Kanto

Go Nagai got there first…

(from Shin Violence Jack, where he is one of the people Jack will be doing the killing to)

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Still getting my head round the next chapter of Violence Jack proper (Mao Dante references are the sticking point), hopefully will have another post up later this week.

Related posts:

1. Violence Jack – Hell’s Wind
2. Violence Jack – Gakuen Bangaichi
3. Violence Jack – Death Police

This story is about a group of evil sumo who bully those weaker than themselves. Even taking into account the fact that the last story featured naked amputees forced to act like dogs, the level of sadism of the villains feels, if not amped up, then at least dwelt upon more. Of course in Nagai’s world, such fiends are equal opportunity bastards. Much like Shameless School, it’s not just female characters who find themselves in bondage. When the young man who Jack helps out this time round, tries to fight the sumo after they kill one of his friends, he gets caught, stripped naked, hung from a tree and is whipped.

They then strip and tie his girlfriend to the tree too and use them as human dartboards, however they both are saved by Jack, in probably the best scene in the story, when he just pulls the tree out the ground and walks off with it.

Freed, they return home, only to find their family and friends dead, haning from nooses, and the evil sumo in the house. When the sumo kill the girl, the boy is filled with rage, causing Jack to show up once more and start with the killing.

Honestly, this story isn’t much to write home about (or to write internet about), it feels like a simple re-introduction that pales beside the first two stories. It’s only the increased nudity and sadism that gives it any notable place in the grand scheme of the series, and frankly that will be othershadowed fairly quickly when we get to the opening salvo of the 1980s run.

Thankfully the remaining Weekly Shonen stories are far more interesting for a variety of reasons.

Related posts:

1. Violence Jack – Kanto Slum Chapter
2. Violence Jack – Hell City Kanto
3. Violence Jack – Downfallen Tokyo Chapter

Which is to say… Violence Jack, friend to the children!

The focus of this chapter is Jack helping the kids battle the evil adults of Kanto. He appears and rescues them from some adults, then takes them into town and to a restaurant. Then things get stabby.

We begin to get hints of Jack’s supernatural nature, as he takes a sword blow to the head and gets stabbed in the abdomen. In fact he uses his abs to then break the sword while it’s embedded in his body!

After they leave town, we learn of the evil behind the state of Kanto, namely it’s ruler Slum King. A masked man, dressed as a samurai, guarded by twelve identical women, his Slum Queen, he also has two “dogs” who will be familiar to readers of Devil Man.

It’s Ryo Asuka and Miki Makimura, and the first major hint that Violence Jack is, in some way, connected to Devil Man. Those two characters are notable as being the two (of the three) characters who loved Akira Fudo/Amon in the previous series, so you might have presumed some kind of link this early on (it’s not confirmed until much, much later).

However, Nagai has another trick up his sleeve which obviously helped make the link more ambiguous. For they are not the only characters from an earlier Nagai series that show up in this chapter.

Those three above are the main characters in Nagai’s 1972 series Omorai-kun. Which seems to have sunk somewhat into obscurity, not even warranting a Japanese wiki page. What little mention there seems to be of him in English is in walkthroughs for the Legend of Dynamic Goushouden GBA game. What I can glean is that it was another coarse social satire from Nagai, this time about a family of beggars and the scatological humour content was amped up somewhat.

They make a brief cameo here, but it’s something Nagai will build on throughout Violence Jack. He employs something similar to Tezuka’s Star System, using characters from other series as characters in Violence Jack. However by time the 80s revival of the series comes around, he will go one step further, often basing arcs on the deconstruction of the original series that characters came from. Just wait until you see the Mazinger Z arc, it will blow your mind!

This whole recycling and rebuilding of his characters and concepts is a fairly important part of Violence Jack and one that gets left out in any discussion of it, in favour of the sex and violence. Even the stories adapted for the OAVs have some of it, and outside of it being briefly mentioned in The Anime Encyclopedia, I don’t think I’ve seen it discussed in English beyond the Devilman connections. And certainly not what other series they were referencing.

OK, back to the stabbing!

Yes. He has picked a swordsman up by his head and used him to slice another man’s arm off.

So, the kids declare war on the Slum King and by war, I mean Violence Jack takes his coat off and starts with the murdering. It’s all going great for the kids, until we get a glimpse of Violence Jack’s dark heart. When one of the adults uses a young girl as a human shield to stop Jack attacking him, Jack’s response isn’t exactly typical of your average action hero…

There’s been hints up to this point, Nagai had superimposed an image of a lion over Jack early on in this story, but this confirms that Jack is as much a beast as he is a man. Finally, he faces off with the Slum King, breaking his mask. We don’t see why the King needs a mask yet, but that is enough to defeat him. Well that and the kids burying his army under a mountain of cars.

Finally Jack wanders off into the wasteland once more, where he is met by a glowing bird of prey. A glowing, TALKING, bird of prey.

This is one of the biggest mysteries to me, and I do wonder if being able to read the actual dialogue would help or not. At first I thought it was supposed to be Silene from Devilman, because that would make sense. However the use of the bird is different in the 80s version, as Jack, Ryou and a third character seem to be able to change into such birds. I’ve still a few more volumes to go, so maybe it’s all revealed properly in the end when various other characters masks are dropped.

Checking the indispensable www.mazingerz.com, this story marked the end of Violence Jack for 3 years, until it returned in 1977.

Related posts:

1. Violence Jack – Downfallen Tokyo Chapter
2. Violence Jack – Black Forest
3. Violence Jack – Gekitou! Mondo

Before my computer died I had a wonderfully long post on the Violence Jack manga prepared. However that is GONE. And so you will instead be suffering an insufferably long series of posts on each chapter of the manga.

But first a couple of disclaimers:

I’m reading the Japanese “Complete Violence Jack” collections. There are two problems with this. The first, most obvious one, is that I can’t read Japanese. What little knowledge I had is long rusted, however if this was a big problem, I wouldn’t be doing this. Nagai’s cartooning skill, especially in the 70s chapters, is strong enough to get over that speed bump. It’s more of a problem in the 80s chapters where… well you’ll see…

Secondly, while the “Complete Violence Jack” is relatively complete, collecting the 70s shonen incarnation and the 80s seinen incarnations, it doesn’t collect the chapters in chronological order. Which makes things fairly confusing in the 80s chapters. Not so much from a continuity point of view, but from a tonal perspective. While the 70s chapters are fairly similar in tone, the 80s version changes over time, and when they are published out of order it’s rather jarring.

—

Violence Jack has something of a reputation in the UK, due to the Manga Video release of the OAVs in the 90s, their subsequent cutting by the BBFC and constant reassuring by Helen McCarthy that the manga is much worse. And to be fair, it is. Sometimes. But not as often you’d think.

In fact, Violence Jack started in the pages of Weekly Shonen Magazine in 1973, hot on the heels of Nagai’s Devilman. As that series had ended with an apocalypse, Violence Jack opens with one. But unlike Devilman’s man/devil-made end, Violence Jack’s is a natural disaster – The Great Kanto Earthquake. After a brief appearance from Jack, we see a general summary of what caused Japan to turn into this wasteland, before meeting the actual main character of the series (at least for now), Ryou Takuma.

Ryou is a young boy living in Tokyo and he is, essentially, the reader. Like a lot of early Nagai heroes, he’s a short, bullied kid who finds it within him to be a hero. We see him going about his life, dealing with the first few tremors of the disaster to come. Then during an average school day, the world ends.

And keeps on ending. Almost all the 250 pages of the first story is given over to Ryou going from his peaceful everyday existence, through hell on earth, everyone he knew dying, until he emerges as the leader of a band of children living in the slums. Jack himself appears on little more than 11 pages of this first tale, interacting with no-one.

Nagai will come back to this approach later on in the series, giving future characters similar flashbacks to the pre-Earthquake time, but outside of a couple of flashback specific chapters in the 80s, this is probably the most extensive use he makes of it. Given the timing of the series release, I do wonder if Kazuo Umezu’s Drifting Classroom was an influence, alongside late 60s/early 70s apocalypse pop culture like Omega Man.

As well as being relatively lacking its title character, there’s another trademark element of Violence Jack that doesn’t come into play in this first story. It’s one that doesn’t get mentioned enough in discussion of the series and I’ll get it when if first raises it’s head in the next story – Kanto Slums Chapter.

Related posts:

1. Violence Jack – Kanto Slum Chapter
2. Violence Jack – Dragon Fort
3. Violence Jack – Black Forest

Related posts:

1. Bub!
2. Separated at Birth?
3. Violence Jack – Gakuen Bangaichi