Oh boy.

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…

OK, now we’re getting to what Violence Jack is all about.

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

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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.

So, three years later, Go Nagai brings Violence Jack back to the pages of Weekly Shonen. From what I’ve seen of his work, I’d say he’s now past his creative peak. I’m not sure if it’s down to using assistants or too heavy a workload, but his cartooning doesn’t have the energy or verve it had on those 1974 pages. And that makes following the story a little harder, given my lack of Japanese skills.

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.

This is where we start to get more of what Violence Jack is about. And something that seems to fade over time.

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.

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.

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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.

Violence Jack is having a cup of tea.