Go Nagai

, better known by the pen name , is a Japanese manga artist and a prolific author of science fiction, fantasy, horror and erotica. He made his professional debut in 1967 with Meakashi Polikichi, but is best known for creating popular 1970s manga and anime series such as Cutie Honey, Devilman and Mazinger Z. He is credited with creating the super robot genre and for designing the first mecha robots piloted by a user from within a cockpit with Mazinger Z, and for pioneering the magical girl genre with Cutie Honey, the post-apocalyptic manga/anime genre with Violence Jack, and the ecchi genre with Harenchi Gakuen. In 2005, he became a Character Design professor at the Osaka University of Arts. He has been a member of the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize's nominating committee since 2009. Life Early life Go Nagai was born on September 6, 1945—in the Ishikawa Prefecture city of Wajima. He is the son of Yoshio and Fujiko Nagai (永井芳雄・冨士子), and the fourth of five brothers. His family had just returned from Shanghai. While he was still in his early childhood, he along with his mother and his four brothers moved to Tokyo after the death of his father. As a child, he was influenced by the work of Gustave Doré (specifically, a Japanese edition of the Divine Comedy) and Osamu Tezuka (Nagai's brother Yasutaka gave him a copy of Lost World). He graduated from the Metropolitan Itabashi High School of Tokyo. While passing his ronin year in a prep school in order to earn placement at Waseda University, he suffered a severe case of diarrhea for three weeks. Aware of his own mortality, he wanted to leave some evidence that he had lived, by doing something that he liked as a child: working on manga. He was determined to create one work of manga in what he thought were his last months. As Nagai prepared for the task, he went to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with catarrh of the colon, and soon healed. But this was the turning point in his life. Convinced that he would continue working on manga, he stopped attending school after three months and started living as a ronin.