[1] 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.

[5] As a child, he was influenced by the work of Gustave Doré (specifically, a Japanese edition of the Divine Comedy), Shirato Sanpei and Osamu Tezuka (Nagai's brother Yasutaka gave him a copy of Lost World).

[7] 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.

[11] Convinced that he would continue working on manga, he stopped attending school after three months and started living as a ronin.

[5] He accepted and the series became a big success, being the first for Nagai[19] and making Shōnen Jump sell more than one million copies.

Harenchi Gakuen is considered as probably the work that has had the most influence in the world of manga at the end of the 1960s, leading the newly born Shōnen Jump magazine to sell millions of copies per week.

Male students and teachers were depicted as being preoccupied with catching glimpses of girls' panties or naked bodies.

[18] As a result of the protests, when the series was about to be cancelled because of the PTA, Nagai changed the theme in Harenchi Gakuen into a more mature and serious matter, from nonsense gags with sexy touches, to a full-scale war where murder was depicted in the bloody way for which many know him.

Abashiri Ikka became a big success, and along with Harenchi Gakuen, the most popular series of Nagai's juvenile period.

This prompted Nagai to end Gakuen Taikutsu Otoko and the story of this series would be left inconclusive.

Even with the changes in Harenchi Gakuen and other series, Nagai remained writing mostly gag comedies, varying only in the thematic.

A series of horror one-shots would follow, in the series called Gensou Kyofu e Hanashi (幻想恐怖絵噺), which comprehends Africa no Chi (an original story of Yasutaka Tsutsui), Schalken Gahaku (based in the famous story Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu) and Kuzureru.

that his aspirations had always been to write more serious science fiction stories, and after the discontinuation of Demon Lord Dante saw Devilman as his chance to break out of the gag manga expectations publishers had of him.

[29] In his series Harenchi Gakuen (ハレンチ学園, Shameless School, 1968–1972, Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine) Nagai used eroticism and extreme, graphic violence in kid's manga for the first time in Japan, thus breaking taboos and becoming quite controversial.

[1] His use of violence and gross humour was widely loathed in many corners of Japan's society and became a concern for many PTAs at the time.

This allowed Nagai to include violence, nudity, and darker themes closer to the content of Demon Lord Dante.

[31] Go Nagai considers the Devilman and Mazinger series to be his life's work due to their massive popularity all over the world.

[32] A month later after finishing Devilman, Nagai would create a sequel to it called Violence Jack (ヴァイオレンス ジャック), another long-running series that spanned multiple volumes and dealt with a giant brute of a man fighting for justice in a post-apocalyptic setting where Japan has been devastated by a massive earthquake and isolated from the rest of the world.

Years later Nagai revamped Devilman featuring versions of the protagonists as young adult women and altering the storyline, which eventually became another sequel story to the original.

One of Nagai's most popular works outside of his fanbase has been Cutey Honey, considered to be one of the first "magical girl" comics and a major influence on future series in the genre (in particular Sailor Moon).

Nagai had less success a few years later with Majokko Tickle, a more traditional magical-girl series for younger children, although the accompanying anime was popular on TV in some European countries.

Its desert wasteland setting had biker gangs, anarchic violence, ruined buildings, innocent civilians, tribal chiefs, and small abandoned villages.

[citation needed] Manga artist Kentaro Miura (Berserk) claims that he likes Go Nagai's dynamic style and that Nagai had a big influence on him, in an interview which was included as an extra in the fourth volume of the North American DVD release by Media Blasters in 2002.

[38] Movie director Yoshihiro Nishimura (Tokyo Gore Police) claimed that he's a fan of Go Nagai's works in an interview with Sancho Asia and said that he wants to re-adapt Devilman into a live action movie since he did not like the 2004 live action Devilman adaptation by Hiroyuki Nasu.

"[41] Japanese novelist, visual novel writer, and anime screenwriter Gen Urobuchi explained that Devilman made him realize that bittersweet endings are the best ones.

[43] Videogame designer, writer, and director Goichi Suda cites two works of Go Nagai, Violence Jack and Susano Oh as his favorite manga.

This list includes titles such as Parasyte, Tokyo Ghoul, and Attack on Titan alongside the afformentioned Neon Genesis Evangelion and Berserk.