The concept of "Demon Lord Dante" is inspired by Nagai's contact with a Gustave Doré-illustrated version of Dante's "Divine Comedy". He found particularly likeable the figure of Lucifer in "Inferno" as "huge creature stuck in the ice in the center of the Earth". He started to think about it in the end of the 1960s, because of the critics he was receiving from his precedent works. His most popular manga until then, "Harenchi Gakuen" (1968–1972), an erotic comedy set in a school, featured satirical critics to the Japanese scholar system and society, and was campaigned against by parent-teacher associations across Japan. As a response, with "Demon Lord Dante", Nagai tried to subvert the traditional view of God and Devil to provocate "the keepers of the standard". As such, "Demon Lord Dante" "represents the struggle between the monster and the standard seen through the eyes of the former", as a pair of literary critics put it. Through the manga, Nagai wanted to show that good is not always the "good guys" and evil could be the right path.