Yet it was available for free on Tubi a few years ago
Due in no small part to its popularity and wide appeal, Shonen action-battle series get all the media attention at home and abroad, unintentionally hiding other genres in the process. So it’s not a big surprise or concern when people erroneously claim that the longest running animanga series is One Piece, or JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, or Dragon Ball. All have been running for decades, with the latter two debuting at the end of the Showa era. The subject of this post however has been in serialization since 1968.
Indeed, the longest-running animanga series still releasing chapters even after the author’s passing is none other than this Japanese take on the well-established James Bond franchise. The mangaka, Takao Saito, designed Golgo 13 to be an international man of mystery. A man with no need for an introduction and gets all the results from the business end of a high-powered scoped rifle. Under the alias “Duke Togo,” Golgo 13’s backstory is up in the air. A legendary figure in international espionage, what’s known about him comes secondhand from those he chooses to work with. As long as they can get him a plan, a gun, and a car, then he’s in business.
The name “Golgo 13” has a symbolic meaning, Golgo being short for Golgotha, the place where Jesus Christ was crucified, and 13, of course, being the unlucky number spelling death and destruction for his targets. And Duke Togo doesn’t seem to discriminate in his choice of target. Coincidence or not, I see a lot of this man in Claude from GTA III.
Before you look at this post inside-out, let’s size them up.
Contract killers from parts unknown with little to no mention of their origin, never mind their own birth names, who take up arms and remove problems for a variety of bosses, sticking their own necks out for a couple of bucks while earning the ire of different people and/or factions. But what separates the Holy Bullet from the grimy drifter is both the environment and the nature of their respective series. Golgo 13 is a professional hitman for hire. So is Claude, but he exists in a world designed to satirize everything from the ground up: New York City (which they needed to make adjustments for because the release date was very close to 9/11), mob life, gang life, pop culture, the works. Saito’s manga is more of an homage to the James Bond franchise and at the time of debut, James Bond only had five movies.
Not to mention, depending on who you ask, the depiction of early Golgo 13 in the manga and the movies is a mirror to the behavior of Sean Connery’s James Bond as well as Connery himself at the time in regard to women. I can’t say for certain if it’s a perfect mirror of Bond, James Bond from that time period having seen the 1983 movie a few years ago on Tubi TV, but just from that, the most I saw was Golgo 13 bedding a sexy lady instead of slapping the hysteria out of her, so I take it that this is a more reserved form of misogyny compared to Connery’s more boisterous form.
Does that make it any better? Well, considering the woman in that scene was more of a side show than a main event, it puts him a stair step above his British counterpart, but it’s worth closely examining Golgo 13’s character in relation to others. By himself, he’s a quiet professional with a singular focus: the target. Personally, I think these kinds of discussions erroneously apply modern customs and expectations to a 1960s Japanese publication, but I won’t refrain from entertaining them. Ditching random women after presenting the solid snake may not sound any better than Connery’s slap ’em and plap ’em, and it’s more or less on par, but with even less to say about this aspect than Golgo 13’s background, I wouldn’t dwell on this as much since the primary focus is Duke Togo and his incredible range.
In line with the nature of this blog’s discovery and promotion of notoriously hard-to-find animanga series among other things, this series is not only right up my alley, but it’s scarcity is tailor-made for a blog like this. 50+ years in serialization, even after the original mangaka died, with a handful of movies to go along with it subbed and dubbed, and yet… hardly a squeak. And understandably so.
The series has a library-occupying 200 volumes to collect so unless Saito’s estate approved omnibus truncations to shrink the number, you may wanna invest in some extra storage space and shelves. It does have a 2008 anime adaptation on Blu-Ray (and has since been made available on the underground pirate sites) 50 episodes strong, and most likely will rely heavily on those brave enough to dedicate hard drive space to keeping it in preservation. And to top it all off, the manga hasn’t had as many people scrambling to translate it for international audiences.
A die-hard fan may have a dedicated section to just the Golgo 13 series and if you happen to be that person…
You might have the blood of a Japanese historian in you, because bringing it to light is a gargantuan task.
And a couple of movies and a 50-episode anime series doesn’t go deep beyond the surface. Having said all of this though, with audiences craving more than paper-thin characters with unchanging motives and priorities, Golgo 13 may not be what a lot of people want these days. Protagonists who aren’t heroic 100% of the time against antagonistic forces who aren’t necessarily evil is what sells than rigid good VS evil, but it creates a false conclusion that pure good and pure evil are bad. I suspect that people who dabble in fanfiction are among those who lambaste these archetypes because it doesn’t give them a lot to work with, especially if they can’t rewrite what already exists due to its non-existence (Golgo 13 being too straightforward to bend into whatever the mind can imagine), but if that’s the case, then I chastise these types back with a megaphonic “LAZY WRITERS!!!”
100 of these guys in a room can crap out Hamlet, so what’s your excuse, fanfiction writers?
But a point can be made about how immovable the character of Golgo 13 can be compared to people like Saichi Sugimoto, Frieren, or JoJolion Josuke Higashikata (東方定助). Sugimoto maintains his eyes on the Ainu gold, but faces mental and physical challenges in search of it. Frieren learns more and more about the late Himmel the Hero long after the journey has ended. And Josuke/Gappy understands who and what he was and is while battling people he regarded as friends and family for control of the Rokakaka fruit.
The usual channels of viewership for the series and the movies are available, but with most of the manga being out of reach due to a lack of translation for the later chapters, I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to skip the manga altogether.
Doesn’t get any simpler than the title, eh? I’ve gotta confess first that I was so busy all week preparing for Army things to last the next few months (not a deployment or rotation, that would last way longer) that I didn’t even think to look at my topics list until last night and even then I was so tired I didn’t have much prepared until this morning save for this opener. Now that I’m well-rested and caffeinated, I’m going to spend this post talking about my journey into hentai, some of my favorite artists, and some updates; one related to work which may or may not have an impact on future blog posts, and one that covers an event in the city where I’m currently stationed.
Now, what is hentai? If you’ve been around the internet or can call yourself a veteran weeb, you might have instantly thought of an image involving an anime girl, tentacles, or in some cases, both. By which I mean a tentacle girl.
And there’s a reason the image of tentacles of have stuck with the genre for decades. For as long as art has been a thing, humanity has been sculpting, painting, and carving images of exaggerated and unrealistic human or humanoid bodies, to include depictions of deities. Travel the world and tell me about all the fertility statues you can find. In recent memory, I’ve stumbled upon a photo of this Indian Yakshini statue.
Shame the head’s missing, but simply what’s left is enough inspiration for countless artists, even today. Observe:
In the context of hentai and overall Japanese pornographic works (live and drawn), the term “hentai” originally carried to connotations denoting strange or inexplicable behavior, not necessarily erotic or sexual in nature. Over time, the term has been so associated with animated porn that search engines preface that the results are censored or otherwise NSFW. For erotic art in Japan, early sources of erotic works of art can be traced all the way back to the Heian period. Theoretically, a daimyo who had some control of the Taira or Minamoto clans at the time likely had a stash of erotic art. Maybe a samurai clan had a treasure trove up until the Meiji Restoration or priceless art where everyone’s bits are out. Who knows?
One of the most famous erotic artists in history was one Katsushika Hokusai and his painting “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife.”
An early depiction of a woman being sexually pleasured by countless appendages and a fixture that will grace the genre centuries later.
From these humble beginnings, come manga. The associated wikipedia page clarifies that what you think of as manga today meant something completely different during the Tokugawa period. I’m not talking about animanga series set in the Edo period (a completely different topic that I have no problem exploring in the future), manga at this time wasn’t made up of structured stories like a serialization or even a yonkoma. The pictures were unrelated and predictably more difficult to make, but if it can be put into a book format and follow a kind of plot with boobs, d[foghorn]ks, and p[tiger]y playing some kind of part in it (and not just in a playfully teasing manner) then by all accounts it’s an erotic manga. These days, we know them as doujinshi, the Japanese term for a self-published work that not a lot of people realize is itself a broad term not necessarily exclusive to hentai and not always limited to physical releases. Name your favorite artist on Twitter or Pixiv or Bilibili, they may or may not have dabbled in putting plot to artwork. Here’s a sneak-peek of one of my favorites:
Source: Tatsunami Youtoku
After manga came adaptations into the form of animation/anime. Classic examples to some of you veterans may include Bible Black or Sailor and the 7 Ballz or for all you Eva fans reading this, the enigmatic Human Salvation Project (the latter of these I found out about yesterday morning). All classics, but none of them are the oldest examples of animated hentai/porn, neither in Japan or elsewhere. Saberspark has an example of one such animation from the late 1920s. His video is below with more details.
Channel: Saperspark
I stand corrected, a link to his video is here with more details. The wikipedia page for the short film is also linked. Six-and-a-half minutes and not too out of place for the Betty Boop-era.
The true earliest form of animated hentai was an Osamu Tezuka directed film adaptation of the 18th-century Middle Eastern folktale 1001 Arabian Nights. There’s two films with the same name released a decade apart in different countries. The American produced 1001 Arabian Nights released in 1959, and the Japanese produced One Thousand and One Nights released in 1969. I probably shouldn’t be surprised that the father of Astro Boy is behind this one. When your contributions kick a genre or medium into overdrive you have to go multiple different places. Still fascinating to see Tezuka’s name on such a thing.
Not as famous as the 1972 raunchy animated film Fritz the Cat, but preceding that film by about three years puts more points in that basket to me.
The more accurate adaptation of the Middle Eastern story isn’t the only one with Tezuka’s name on it as he also helped direct a raunchy retelling of Cleopatra’s life. After that erotic and hentai-like adaptations lay dormant and sparsely touched until the mid-1980s. Considering their laws addressing such material is from the late Meiji era when lines on maps were the most important thing in the world, in Japan’s case all hands on deck would be needed for such endeavors and leaving erotica uncensored was grounds for imprisonment. These days, it still is, which is why so many doujins and even live-action porn, known in Japan as adult videos, are censored even though the intended demographic is 18+… I won’t lie, I was a horny teen once.
I’m not a lawyer and I can’t argue in favor of either censoring or uncensoring Japanese porn and hentai, but what I do know is that the restrictions in place have inspired many geniuses ever since. An uncensored penis is how the artist gets slapped on theirs with a giant dildo bat not seen since Saints Row, but similarly shaped phalluses are not, which is all an artist needs to simulate pentrative intercourse or self-pleasure without the addition of censor bars, pixels, or more recently the lightsaber effect. The earliest of phallic replacements for the penis was tentacles which brings me back to Hokusai’s famous painting. We began with the likes of an octopus or other cephalopod caressing a naked woman’s body and have not looked back ever since.
Nowadays, references call back regularly to these early depictions of hentai online with comments showing tentacles in any such manner being some amalgamation of “I’ve seen enough hentai to know how this ends.” The genre wasn’t even done evolving. Where else could you find erotic anime-style scenes? Video games. Specifically, visual novels.
You might be familiar with early attempts at adult video games and the continuing legacy that I’ve found myself a part of recently, and that’s just speaking of the west where earlier depictions have fallen into controversy even in the wild times of the 1970s and ’80s. The time where the sexual revolution helped boost many names in porn and the video game industry hadn’t found its legs yet. The most infamous examples of adult-themed video games with any such action come in the form of the controversial Custer’s Revenge and X-Man, the latter of which is notorious for the pixely depiction of a Civil War and Indian Wars general George Armstrong Custer taking advantage of a bound, nude Amerindian woman.
Crazy that it took until Mortal Kombat and Night Trap to create the ESRB. Considering this s[bricks]t exists, it should’ve happened sooner.
From woodblock ukiyo-e print to manga to moving frames to playable frames, having dumped all that lore on the history of anime pornography on you, before I list my favorites, I must make another confession. My history with hentai is simultaneously a blindspot and a poorly-explored endeavor. Some of my recommendations come from the appropriate subreddits, but I’ve made a habit of saving so many posts and links that it’d take longer to find and paste the links into a browser than it would to view it all. As for what I have seen, Reddit’s not the only place I’ve seen what can be classed as hentai. Pixiv, Danbooru, Gelbooru, and even Twitter allow users to view and/or upload porn in some manner, though Pixiv and Twitter require age verification, Twitter especially recently.
My introduction to hentai actually came in the form of ecchi series like High School DxD and Shimoneta (both of which I’ve written about already). Shimoneta had a message about censorship hidden in between all the boobage and panty shots while DxD didn’t exactly have that same message and was merely about angels and devils with a side of T ‘n A, which sounds like the worst possible way to describe the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise.
Credit: u/thot_patrol117, s/EvangelionMemes
Try not to look for deeper meaning amongst the Eva memes. It’s not the deep. But the franchise definitely is, if you’re willing to take Hideaki Anno at face value.
I believe I’ve said it before that DxD and Shimoseka were gateways to pornographic animanga and I hold onto that dearly. They got the ball rolling by proudly showing Rias’ tits and boldly displaying the consequences of a horny (read: predatory in this context) awakening and thus led me to discover more hentai series. I’ve seen many and read many but my personal favorites have to be as follows:
I Want to do Sexy Things with my Tall Younger Cousin
Seika Jogakuin Koutoubu Konin Sao Ojisan; and
Twin Milf
Admittedly something of a one-shot with an incest angle, the central themes of this plot boil down to a tall girl fetish. The fantasy lies in a shorter male scaling a taller female like summiting Mt. Everest on the journey to her Mt. Everests. See what I did there? It also does away with the cutesy embarassed trope. The two main leads are hardly what I’d call shy, in fact, they both confidently know what they want with hints in the doujin alluding to a history of having done this type of thing. What really reels me in is the tomboy trope of the female lead. Cute and playful, she reminds me of Tomo Aizawa from Tomo-chan is a Girl in some ways. Hardly anything deeper than surface level though so those who wanted some drama may have to look elsewhere.
Created by Kurosu Gatari, it translates to English as Seika Girls’ Academy Official Sanctioned Gigolo. This one does have a plot to go with the mountains and valleys. A man with a friend in debt agrees to share some of that debt to help the first guy get back on his feet, this means he has to repay the remaining debt and to do so he takes a job as a gigolo for an all girls’ school. The test involving sex with the dean of the school, before passing and being allowed to exercise this blessing on a select number of students. The operative logic behind this move is hands-on stress relief seeing as sex is a great way to relieve stress and burn calories.
Each of the girls is unique in their own right, one of them having deep-seated daddy issues that don’t arise until she reluctantly uses these gigolo services herself where she gradually evolves from bitch of the school to stern hand. Getting d[monkeys]ked down by the school man-whore softens her up so much that it leads to a personality change. From punishing a tiny infraction to brushing it off like a levelheaded adult, I haven’t crossed that bridge yet but with so many stories corroborating this, a little bit of bumping uglies does seem to go a long way. For the male lead, he’s drawn like an ugly bastard, but is merely just a middle-aged gentleman facing an unusual problem. Debt he can handle, but feeling like a hooker to pay some of it off over time was the last thing he was expecting. What makes his situation more tricky is that he’s married with a daughter no older than the girls he’s getting paid to sexually pleasure, so life at home gets extra awkward when his side job is to mingle with girls like this to make some extra cash. So if you want more drama than the last entry’s “tall girl fantasy,” have at it.
Created by a master of MILF hentai Tatsunami Youtoku, Twin Milf is exactly as advertised on the tin, identical twin sisters with voluptuous body types. A college student and avid soccer player/fan is neighbors with a thick, busty woman. In one such incident, water leaks down into his apartment where she comes down personally to apologize, only for him to accidentally grope her breasts and realize she put something on very quickly (i.e. no bra). From there, he spills the beans to his best bro who’s stuck with a tsundere girlfriend who doesn’t suffer perverts. Main MC presumably runs into his MILFy neighbor again only she’s more perverted than originally introduced and invites him to f[cannonball]k her in her own car.
It isn’t until after this he realizes she’s a twin and the rest of the series takes off. Like Kurosu Gatari, Tatsunami has a type and it’s a woman so thick the clapping of her ass cheeks alerts all of Western Australia and part of Jakarta.
These aren’t exhaustive recommendations as I have more from the same artists and then some so consider this another gateway that I’ll leave open for you to enter.
Now for those updates: without revealing too much, starting on June 16 and continuing until October, my unit will be travelling periodically back and forth between Fort Bliss in El Paso and a missile range in New Mexico. Thankfully, the first week will only be about three days long since Juneteenth is a federal holiday that I have off, so I can get the next topic out in time. We won’t be there during the weekends to my understanding so until later this year the posts will see a Saturday or Sunday release at the latest. If not, then delays are to be expected.
For the event happing in El Paso, I’m currently writing this whilst I have a ticket to an anime convention in El Paso lasting June 14 and 15 until the evening hours. I don’t exactly plan to write about my experiences in detail as each one is different, but it will be my first one in a different city, having attended one in Augusta during AIT last June. If I do, it’ll be more spur of the moment than regularly scheduled.
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