But even though the artist ended up making groundbreaking contributions to manga and anime, his career path was as peculiar as the worlds he created. After the success of Mazinger Z, it was hard to imagine controlling your giant robot from anywhere but inside the machine. The idea of multiple vehicles interlocking and combining propelled the lions of Voltron (Beast King Go Lion) to massive success in North America, but that too got its start in Mazinger Z before getting developed in Getter Robo, another anime series that Nagai helped create for Toei. Same with the series’ voice commands like “pilder on!” and “missile fire!” But in an interview for the Japanese government’s now-defunct Media Arts Plaza, Nagai revealed that his decision to drop academics for manga was less a lifelong ambition than the result of a cruel prank.

When his older brother found out the younger Nagai was having a prolonged bout with diarrhea, he told him that it must be colon cancer (“a guy I know just died from that”), which the younger brother naively believed. Even though he saw a doctor right away, he had to wait days for the results, during which time his “view of the world completely changed.” The artist explained, “I would feel like I was isolated from the outside world in this kind of clear balloon… this isn’t a figure of speech — I could really see the balloon. When I was overcome with this intense loneliness, I just thought, rather than get rich, or have a beautiful wife, I wanted to leave some kind of proof that I had lived. Like a scratch on the wall — ‘I was here.’” He decided that artifact would be manga. When the tests came back negative, Nagai had already plotted his life’s course.