Item Spotlight: The Devil Man Who Put the Pilot Inside

The object is a telephone card. Fifty units, unused, unpunched, sealed in a PSA slab at Gem Mint 10. It was sold in one building, over a few weeks, in 1998.

The building was hosting a career retrospective for Go Nagai. That is the part worth explaining, because if you do not already know what he did, the card is just a phone card.

The traffic jam

Go Nagai, born Kiyoshi Nagai in 1945 in Wajima, Ishikawa. He and his brothers founded Dynamic Productions in April 1969, which was one of the first studios in the business to make publishers sign contracts. Hold onto that detail, it tells you what kind of operator he was.

In October 1972 he began serializing Mazinger Z in Weekly Shonen Jump. The anime premiered on Fuji TV that December and ran 92 episodes.

Here is what he changed. Giant robots already existed in manga. Tetsujin 28-go had been around since the 1950s. But Tetsujin was operated by remote control, a boy standing at a distance working a handset, the robot as a very large tool. Nagai put a cockpit in the chest and a person in the cockpit.

The reported origin of the idea is that he was stuck in traffic, watching drivers who obviously wanted to climb over the cars in front of them, and thought about a giant robot you would drive from the inside the way you drive a car.

That is the whole genre. Every mecha series where somebody straps into a machine and the machine becomes an extension of them, Gundam, Evangelion, all of it downstream, traces to that structural choice. To be precise, because precision matters here: Mazinger Z was not the first mecha anime. It was the first time the pilot went inside. Those are different claims and people collapse them constantly.

The rest of the résumé

He was not a one-idea man. Harenchi Gakuen ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1968 to 1972 and introduced open eroticism into mainstream manga. Parents, PTAs, and women's associations came after him hard. He was publicly called an enemy of society. He kept working.

Devilman ran in Kodansha's Weekly Shonen Magazine from June 11, 1972 to June 24, 1973, five volumes, with the anime premiering July 8, 1972. Cutie Honey followed in 1973, and Violence Jack the same year.

So inside about five years: the piloted robot, the modern transforming heroine, and a horror manga whose ending people still argue about. That is not a run most people get in a lifetime.

What is on the card

The art is Devil Lady, mid transformation.

Devilman Lady ran in Kodansha's Weekly Morning from January 1997 to July 2000, 17 volumes. The lead is Jun Fudo, a model who transforms into a devil and gets pulled into government work hunting devil beasts, creatures evolved out of ordinary people, while losing pieces of her own humanity along the way. The TMS anime ran 26 episodes from October 1998 to May 1999 and reached English-speaking markets as Devil Lady, licensed by ADV Films in 2003.

One detail that gets missed. Devilman's protagonist is Akira Fudo. Devil Lady's is Jun Fudo. The surname is not a coincidence, it is Nagai returning to the same well twenty five years later with a different question in mind.

The card is copyright 1998 Dynamic Pro and Kodansha, so the licensing runs through both his studio and the publisher that carried the series.

Why exhibition telecas are hard

Some background, in case telephone cards are new to you.

NTT phone cards, teleca for short, were prepaid cards for public phones in Japan. Fifty units was the standard denomination. Companies printed them as promotional items constantly through the 80s and 90s: magazine reader giveaways, retailer bonuses, event merchandise. They were cheap to produce and they were everywhere.

Two things then happen to the supply.

First, they were meant to be used. Using one punches holes in it as the value burns down. A used teleca is a used teleca, and most of them were used, because that was the point of them.

Second, and this is the specific thing about this card, exhibition exclusives were sold at the venue only. There was no mail order, no shop distribution, no second printing when it sold through. The entire run moved through one physical location over a limited window to whoever showed up. Then the exhibition closed.

So the surviving population is a subset of a subset: people who attended, who bought one, who did not use it, and who then kept it in good enough shape for thirty years.

Honest gap, and I would rather say it than fake it: I do not have a print run figure for this card. Exhibition merchandise numbers from 1998 are mostly not public, and anyone quoting you a hard number for a card like this is guessing. What can be said is structural. Venue-only distribution over a fixed window caps the ceiling, and normal use grinds down what is left.

On the grading

This one is PSA 10 Gem Mint, cert 127074551, sealed in the original holder.

Unpunched matters more than it sounds. It means the card was never inserted into a phone, so the full value is intact and the surface never went through a machine. Combine that with a 10 and you are looking at a card that went from the exhibition table into storage and stayed there.

If you are new to graded telecas, the thing to know is that surface is where these live or die. They are laminated plastic and they scuff. A card can be unused and still grade mid because it rode around in a drawer.

The card is here if you want to look at it properly.

Either way, now you know why a man in a traffic jam is the reason Shinji has a cockpit.