I haven't seen this posted in the tags so might as well do it myself. Translation by @StonerOctopusLR on Twitter.
I wanted to talk about/translate this comment Nagai made on the first publication of Violence Jack in the late 90s, it's important to note that it remained incomplete and was only re-done and finished in 2017 by another publisher (another did 19 volumes in 2005 but went bankrupt).
"Creation of My Energy" is its title, in which Nagai said that, when writing Jack, he wanted to recreate the rivalry between landowners of the Sengoku period, "a picture of those times on a grand scale, in which many heroes fought for victory".
Nagai describes Jack as "the symbol of the energy that moves nature and time, he is the wind and the flames, of the sea and earth. He is also the unlimited energy of human beings, reflecting the whole universe based on the people he comes in contact with, under many forms.
To those with gentle hearts he is the symbol of love, while in front of people consumed by greed and hatred he becomes a demon. Jack is a mirror that reflects what's hidden in the deepest area of the human soul of those he encounters."
"When I started writing Violence Jack I wanted to illustrate characters who become stronger after encountering him, became commanders of their respective groups and then competed between each other for supremacy"
Nagai says how he doesn’t like to have the entire plot in his head from the get-go. "if the plot is excessively established, the dialogue remains prisoner of the structure.Once the character is established and given emotion, the setting decided, the dialogue flows driven by inspiration of how characters moves" (...) but had the final pages of Jack in mind from the start, from 1973 to 1990 the ending stayed the same.
