Nagai Kiyoshi, better known by the pen name Nagai Go, is a Japanese manga artist and a prolific author of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and erotica. He made his professional debut in 1967 with Meakashi Polikichi, but is best known for creating popular 1970s manga and anime series such as Cutie Honey, Devilman, and Mazinger Z. He is credited with creating the super robot genre and for designing the first mecha robots piloted by a user from within a cockpit with Mazinger Z, and for pioneering the magical girl genre with Cutie Honey, the post-apocalyptic manga/anime genre with Violence Jack, and the ecchi genre with Harenchi Gakuen. In 2005, he became a Character Design professor at the Osaka University of Arts. He has been a member of the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize's nominating committee since 2009.

Nagai Go was born on September 6, 1945—in the Ishikawa Prefecture city of Wajima. He is the son of Nagai Yoshio and Fujiko, and the fourth of five brothers. His family had just returned from Shanghai. While he was still in his early childhood, he along with his mother and his four brothers moved to Tokyo after the death of his father. As a child, he was influenced by the work of Gustave Doré (specifically, a Japanese edition of the Divine Comedy), and Osamu Tezuka (Nagai's brother Yasutaka gave him a copy of Lost World).

He graduated from the Metropolitan Itabashi High School of Tokyo. While passing his ronin year in a prep school in order to earn placement at Waseda University, he suffered a severe case of diarrhea for three weeks. Aware of his own mortality, he wanted to leave some evidence that he had lived, by 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 the 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.

With the help of his brother Yasutaka, he created his first manga works. Despite the fact that his mother opposed his manga aspirations, he submitted his works for publication, accumulating many rejections. It is said that when the young Nagai submitted his tables to publishers, his mother secretly convinced publishers to reject them. However, his work was noticed by Weekly Shonen Sunday, which contacted Ishinomori Shotaro. Thanks to some trial manga he created with the help of Yasutaka, Nagai was finally accepted into the studio of Ishinomori in 1965.

The trial manga was about a science fiction ninja and was a prototype for a different story, Kuro no Shishi. Nagai was 19 years old when he made this work; it started at 15 or 16 pages and ended up being 88 pages long after a year, and was untitled at that time. Ishinomori saw this work and praised Nagai for it, but commented that the design was too chunky and he should improve it a little. Two or three days later, Nagai was invited to become an assistant to Ishinomori and this work was forgotten until 2007 when it was published in the magazine Comic Ran Twins Sengoku Busho Retsuden by LEED under the name Satsujinsha. His professional career began in 1967, despite the opposition of his mother.

After working as the assistant of Ishinomori Shotaro, his very first professional manga work was Meakashi Polikichi, a very short gag comedy one-shot, published in November 1967 in the magazine Bokura by Kodansha. Almost at the same time, this was followed by the manga adaptation of Sagisu Tomio's TV anime Chibikko Kaiju Yadamon, also published in 1967 in the same magazine. A common misconception is that Kuro no Shishi was his first manga work; while not entirely false, what Nagai really made two years earlier than Meakashi Polikichi, was only a draft for what would later be Kuro no Shishi, which would not be actually published until 1978.

His first works consisted entirely of short gag comedy manga. This would change with Harenchi Gakuen.

In less than a year after debuting, he met with a big success. After being an unknown manga artist, he became a protagonist of televised debates and journalistic investigations.

In 1968, while Shueisha was getting prepared to launch its first manga publication, Shonen Jump, in order to compete with other magazines from rival companies (like Shonen Magazine from Kodansha and Shonen Sunday from Shogakukan), Nagai was invited to be one of the first manga artists publishing in the new magazine. He contemplated this since he had to design a long-running series instead of the auto-conclusive short stories that he had been developing until that point. He accepted and the series became a big success, being the first for Nagai and making Shonen Jump sell more than one million copies. With Harenchi Gakuen, Nagai was the first to introduce eroticism in modern manga and became the creator of the modern erotic manga, opened the door to a new era in manga, and also became the symbol of an entire generation. This work has influenced Japanese society radically, completely changing the common perceptions of manga.

In 1970, Nagai Go started a company, Dynamic Productions, to fund his manga and anime ventures. Dynamic Productions' first titles were Getter Robo and Abashiri Ikka.

One of Nagai's most popular works outside of his fanbase has been Cutey Honey, considered to be one of the first "magical girl" comics and a major influence on future series in the genre (in particular Sailor Moon). Nagai had less success a few years later with Majokko Tickle, a more traditional magical-girl series for younger children, although the accompanying anime was popular on TV in some European countries.

In 1980, he received the 4th Kodansha Manga Award for shonen for Susano OH.

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