Kinutani’s art is the star here. Moving away from Nagai’s blocky dynamism, Amon embraces a 90s “extreme” aesthetic: hyper-detailed muscle fibers, spattered inks, and double-page spreads of demonic anatomy that feel like H.R. Giger meeting a slasher film. Amon’s design is less a heroic fusion and more a biological weapon—jagged, asymmetrical, with a mouth that unhinges like a serpent. In the original, Miki is the light. Her death is the turning point. In Amon , she becomes the story’s true protagonist and its most tragic figure. She spends the volume journeying across hell on earth, not to fight, but to talk . She endures psychological assaults, demonic temptations, and the sight of her beloved’s face twisted into a perpetual snarl.
When Miki finds the creature, it is not Akira in anguish. It is —pure, unfiltered demonic id. Amon remembers Akira’s hatred of evil, but without Akira’s humanity, that hatred becomes omnicidal. He does not fight out of love; he fights out of a predator’s instinct. The result is some of the most graphically violent artwork in the Devilman lineage—bodies are not just killed but unmade , torn into ribbons of viscera with a cold, reptilian efficiency.
Their hope: that Miki can reach the “Akira” still buried inside the demonic form that now rampages across the wasteland. amon: devilman
In the pantheon of dark manga, Go Nagai’s 1972 Devilman is the primordial scream—a tale of apocalyptic tragedy where the sensitive hero, Akira Fudo, merges with the demon Amon to fight Satan’s army, only to lose everything. But in 1999, Yu Kinutani asked a brutal question: What if the hero never came back?
Amon: The Darkside of Devilman is not a retelling. It is a corpse-autopsy of a shonen protagonist. The manga opens one year after the original series’ devastating finale. Satan, having slaughtered humanity, now wanders a silent, ruined Earth, haunted by the memory of the friend he was forced to kill. But resurrection is not salvation. Miki Makimura—Akira’s childhood friend and symbolic heart of the original story—is brought back to life by a cabal of terrified psychics. Kinutani’s art is the star here
For fans, it is essential as the missing link between Nagai’s classic and the 2018 Crybaby adaptation (which borrows Amon ’s raw body horror and Miki’s prolonged, brutal death). For newcomers? Do not start here. This is the hangover after the apocalypse—the story that admits there is no cure for being a devil. Only the silence of a demon wearing a dead boy’s face.
There’s just one problem. The Core Horror: The Demon as the Default The central terror of Amon is psychological. In the original, Akira’s willpower dominated the demon Amon, keeping the beast caged. Kinutani posits that a year of grief, rage, and the annihilation of every human he loved has eroded that cage to nothing. Amon’s design is less a heroic fusion and
Amon sits atop a mountain of skulls, staring at a blood-red sky. He does not laugh. He does not mourn. He simply waits for the next thing to kill. Akira Fudo is not inside anymore. There is only the dark side.