Corben created Den as the protagonist of a film short titled Neverwhere while working at Calvin Studios, an animation company in Kansas City.

Corben followed this with an ongoing Den series, which did not have the full frontal nudity that was the hallmark of the original Heavy Metal strips.

Corben went back to the adult content with Den Saga, which filled in some of the details between Children of Fire and Neverwhere and Muvovum.

The first Den story, as told in the short film Neverwhere, is clearly inspired by the Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter of Mars novels.

In the beginning of the film, an office worker is shown reading the 1963 reprint of A Princess of Mars, before he is turned down for a date by a coworker and quits his job.

The apparatus opens a gateway to a fantasy world named "Neverwhere", where he was transformed into a hairless, nude, muscular, and prodigiously endowed adventurer.

In his Earth incarnation, David had found a letter in one of the fantasy novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs left to him by his uncle Dan.

Shortly after his arrival he meets an evil nude masked woman, known as the Red Queen (perhaps a reference to the character in Through the Looking-Glass) who seems to know Den and is about to sacrifice her doppelgänger Kath to Uhluhtc.

According to Jan Strnad's introduction to Denz, "The saga of Den's exploits... lusty and brawling, brimming with magic, intrigue, horror and betrayal... spanned generations and filled many exotic volumes.

An extreme case is Kil, who is consecutively portrayed as a noble sexless warrior, a maternal caretaker of an embryo, a lustful lover, a deposed queen with magical powers, an evil witch who engages in human sacrifice, a ruthless tyrant who burns down a city, a fraudulent heroic adventurer, etc.

Scholar Maurice Horn remarked that Den 1 "sounds like a lot of hokum ... but it is saved by Corben's astonishing graphic mastery and the sweep of his composition".

[28] Historian Paul Gravett thinks that "Corben's plotting may be erratic and prone to charges of sexism and cliché, but his total conviction and self-absorption in imagining this sensual dreamscape captivate and transport us there".

[31] D. Aviva Rothschild wrote about the first volume, "Although coherent and interesting, the story takes second place to Corben's lush, magnificent, fully painted, animation-quality art".

[34] Antonio Sánchez Rodríguez pondered Corben's comments of the character Den being his imagined alter ego, interpreting him as being conceived to oppose sexual repression through desinhibition and deliberate hypersexualization.

Small details are changed (Kath is now from Gibraltar), some concessions to appease the MPAA from giving the film an "X" rating such as the main characters wearing small loin garments (which playfully disappear for the female leads in long shots and when they are not depicted frontally, leaving them fully nude), some characters and subplots are eliminated, but the segment follows the plot of the comic story fairly closely.

The rest of the voice cast consists of Jackie Burroughs as Katherine Wells, Martin Lavut as Ard, Marilyn Lightstone as the Queen, and August Schellenberg as Norl.

This adaptation has been compared in its idea to The Wizard of Oz by critic Chris Hicks, who says the story is, "about two children changed into fantasy adults with a 'bring-me-the-broomstick-of-the-wicked-witch'-style mission, etc".

A studio was set up in London because, according to Stokes "many animators are not good artists",[36] meaning they are not skilled in drawing the human figure realistically, and art students were recruited to pitch in on the production.