Amon: Devilman -

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.

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. amon: devilman

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.

The cruelest moment comes when she finally embraces Amon. For a single panel, Akira’s eyes flicker back—recognizing her, weeping. Then Amon roars, shreds her body, and moves on. It is not malice. It is biology. Amon simply has no use for a heart. Amon is not merely a sequel. Half the narrative is a flashback to the demon war in prehistory, revealing Amon as Satan’s former general—a being of pure, loyal violence who was betrayed and sealed away. This backstory reframes the entire Devilman mythos. Akira did not tame a random beast; he merged with a betrayed, millennia-old engine of war. Amon’s takeover is not a corruption. It is a homecoming . Why It Matters Amon: The Darkside of Devilman is an uncomfortable work. It lacks the operatic tragedy of the original’s finale or the punk-rock nihilism of Devilman Lady . Instead, it offers a bleaker thesis: Some pain cannot be survived. Not as a person. Amon sits atop a mountain of skulls, staring

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.

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. He simply waits for the next thing to kill

Their hope: that Miki can reach the “Akira” still buried inside the demonic form that now rampages across the wasteland.