Devimon

Devimon debuted before any other explicitly evil or diabolical digimon in both game and anime formats, including his own prevolution. In the virtual pets, several unrelated Digimon could evolve into this powerful virus type as an alternative to Angemon, and in the anime, Devimon was the main villain of the first story arc, the very monster that actually prompted Patamon to finally evolve for the first time.

As the go-to Bad Man Digimon of the series since the start, Devimon serves his purpose pretty well and still holds up great as a design, especially since he's been allowed to keep his freakishly gangly proportions to this day while the Angel digimon are drawn increasingly human.

What's truly great about this guy, though, are the sheer layers of goth he's pulling off. It's not enough that he's covered head to toe in black latex, that he has giant skeleton hands or that he has tattered bat-raven wings, no. He's also got...hang on, let's find another angle so we can take a proper inventory...


 * TWO skull markings.
 * ONE red bat-shape marking.
 * ONE red bat-shape-devil-face combo marking.
 * THREE unnecessary zippers.
 * FOUR metal ball studs.
 * FIVE studded leather bands
 * FIVE partial metal bands
 * FOUR sets of stitches on the same arm.
 * ONE mummy-bandaged hand.
 * THIRTEEN leather belts.
 * ZERO leather belts that are holding anything up.

It's a scientific fact: you cannot and you will not out-goth-punk this electronic monster man. Don't even try. The only one who can ever possibly stand to do so is himself, as we will see later.

Another fun thing about Devimon is the fact that they even got away with this in 1999 at all. I talked about this a couple times when we were reviewing Pokemon, most notably when I reviewed the Abra family, but the America I grew up in was still coming down of the Satanic Panic of the 60's and 70's, and a significant swathe of the nation spent the turn of the millenium in outrage at the fact that, if you kind of squint, these "pokey mon" things could almost be interpreted as d-d-d-DEMONS.

DEMONS! SATAN'S DEMONS in a CARTOONY PICTURE SHOW what CHILDREN LOOK AT!

Meanwhile, Digimon not only had this full blown Satan in it, but went on to have approximately 10,000,000,000 more Satans, including even good guy Satans, which would have had these watchdogs positively busting a gasket if they'd ever really bothered to pay attention to this series.

Digivolves from

 * 1) DemiDevimon

Digivolves to

 * 1) Myotismon