When Adam and Eve were banished from Paradise, I was born. With the descendants of Adam and Eve, I was stolen away … and thrown into a new world. And in this land I was raised, amid the suffering of its people … My name is the Blues.

So begins Akira Hiramoto’s Me and the Devil Blues, my most recent and dramatic example of how ambitious manga can truly be. It’s doubly unusual in that it’s a Japanese comic about a figure from American musical history—but let’s face it, you’d have trouble overestimating the impact of American popular culture in Japan in all of its forms, especially American music. One of my own favorite musicians from Japan, underground guitar-god Keiji Haino, was inspired by Blind Lemon Jefferson and calls himself “just a bluesman”; heck, they even the word blues itself in Japanese—ブルース—is a direct import from English.

Devil turns to the life of Delta bluesman Robert Johnson for its inspiration, someone whom the term “legendary” follows around like a halo. The broad outlines of his life do read like legend: he had a prodigious talent for the guitar at a young age, drifted around and played and womanized, recorded only a bare handful of songs that have all since become blues staples, and had only two photographs taken of him in his entire life. And then in 1938, at the age of 27, he was dead—poisoned by a jealous husband, or so the mythology goes, for hitting on his wife. The mythology was all the more aggrandized by the notion that Johnson had indeed sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for his guitar wizardry. Devil assumes the myth is true, and spirals feverishly outwards from that conceit to create a kind of parallel mythology of Robert Johnson’s life. It’s not meant to be a factual biography, but a fantasy about Johnson and the America he lived in at the time—a land of depression, Prohibition, racism, superstition, violence, and, yes, that ole devil blues.