#devilman influence

Once you know to look for them, they start coming to you, but they've somehow managed to stay as kinda under the surface as anime lore and don't have any kind of wiki that I know of. The closest that there is to a widespread concept of them afaik is the idea of 'Komaedas'/the Komaeda checklist, which is like... similar concept but without the awareness that there is actually a legitimate link here between a lot of the "major" ones

I was actually working on a wiki for them, but I ended up putting it on hiatus because I figured there'd be more interest in a decent translation of gekiman lol (which I have,, also had to put on hiatus because of school, but I'll get back to it soon). It's something I do want to get around to though

The first time I saw any concept of it was from this tweet (which appears to be a repost of a pic from here), but it did give me the idea to try and organize them by lineages, so here's some similar maps I tried to make for Ryos/Akiras/Mikis/Amons with a few friends a while ago. This is the closest to a list that I know of existing, and I know these are definitely still missing a bunch. I don't think I've posted these before? So here I guess, incomplete or not

(Ignore the colour coding; it was kinda an attempt to organize how confirmed of an expy characters are (confirmed influence on character/confirmed influence on series/speculation of varying degrees of insanity) but a lot of it is guesswork since we didn't really go digging through interviews for every creator.)

We also kinda had an attempt running at creating our own checklist based off some ideas from the above linked map, the Komaeda checklist, and this chart, but I honestly haven't looked at it in a few years so I should review it before posting it. Input/criticism on any of this is very welcomed of course

@147cookies it's actually surprisingly direct! There's been general admissions of devilman being an influence on death note (the crybaby hand poster, Satan fanart, how using Christian imagery in shounen generally traces back to devilman, etc), but Obata mentions being inspired by Akira when designing L, which makes Light's position as a Ryo more viable as his opponent, all things considered

From L's page on the death note wiki:

When Obata's editor told him that he wanted L to have a face "looking cool based on the angle," Obata added black "bags" under L's eyes, and he cited Devilman's Akira Fudou when expressing his belief that black bags "looked cool."

[Say what you will about the sanity of considering under-eye bags cool lmao. Extremely funny to think about Akira's lower lashes as eye bags though]

I don't know if O&O have ever directly commented on whether Light was intended to take anything from Ryo, but he gets some Lucifer imagery especially in the first OP. I mean, there's a lot of Christian allusions made in death note (I think across the series Light alone is likened to Judas, Adam, Jesus, and Lucifer), but still:

-name: Light → Lightbringer → Lucifer

-the final shot of Light in the first OP being him in front of what appears to be a painting of Lucifer falling from Heaven

As well as arguably following a number of other Ryo-isms (part of a dark haired + light(er) haired homoerotic narrative foil/adversary duo, morally questionable (or flat out wrong) actions for what he believes will make the world a better place, unusually talented/has special abilities, conventionally attractive young man, etc). Tbh I didn't think about it either until I saw him and L on that one venn diagram of gay ships that were all ryoakira-derived and then narumitsu hgshdj

Due to a certain shitpost of mine getting some attention on twitter, I figured I’d transcribe the names of the series from the hand of Devilman works + works influenced by it that was released during crybaby (found here):

Full series list (with English names) under the cut!