Trivia

While passing in a prep school, he suffered a severe case of diarrhea for 3 weeks. Believing he had not long to live, he wanted to leave some evidence that he had lived, through doing something that he liked as a child: working on manga. He was determined to create one work of manga in what he thought were his last months. As Nagai prepared for the task, he went to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with catarrh of the colon, and soon healed. But this was a turning point in his life: convinced that he would continue working on manga, he stopped attending school after three months and started living as a ronin.

Nagai liked foreign movies, and used to read Playboy magazine.

His "Harenchi Gakuen" work drew serious complaints and protests from Japanese parents and teachers. His fans supported him throughout the protests however; they sent him letters where they expressed how they were aware that the adults cracking down on them were reading raunchier stuff than what Nagai was producing.

He cites the works of artist Gustave Doré and cartoonist Osamu Tezuka as an influence on his work.

Considered to be the pioneer of ecchi and hentai manga with having first started erotic drawings of girls in manga. He started this with his 1968 comedy manga "Harenchi Gakuen" ("Shameless School"), which was meant to showcase embarrassing situations (girls exposing their panties, boys peeping on girls). It developed serious controversy, but also became wildly popular and succeeded in influencing Japanese society radically, and completely changing the common perceptions of manga.

He got the idea for Cutey Honey from the serial Ai no senshi Reinbôman (1972), about a superhero who takes on different forms with different abilities.

Nagai was born the month after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan's surrender. Thus, growing up in Japan immediately after World War II influenced his works.

In 1972, Nagai managed to have 5 weekly manga publications at the same time, drawing and writing. This hasn't been achieved by other manga artists with the exception of Shinji Mizushima and George Akiyama.

He was staring at a traffic jam, and he saw a car's front had crashed into another one's rear. Then he wondered what it would be like if two machines merged into another... and thus he pioneered the idea of combining robots. He however is not the actual creator of the concept - he gave the idea to Ken Ishikawa, who used it in his "Getter Robo" work.

He is a big fan of Star Wars, and even has two large action figures of both Darth Vader and Yoda. Most of his stories also have lots of Star Wars-esque elements (aliens, cyborgs, robots, etc).

He likes to include Futanari in his hentai stories, and, sometimes, even his non-hentai works.