While Gridman unfortunately failed to get it’s own followup show, the series didn’t quite die. While a series proper was out of the question, Gridman would get a story in the form of the Telvi-Kun story The Demon King’s Counterattack, which was serialized right after the show wrapped. In this magazine story, the evil Khan Digifier’s brother, Neo Khan Digifier seeks revenge for his brother’s death, and attacks the real world with an army of monsters. Opposing him are Gridman, and Gridman Sigma, a new Hyper Agent who has the reformed Takeshi Todo as his host! While it’s not on the level of a proper tokusatsu show, this story does serve as a good epilogue for the original show, and gives us some fun, new monsters to talk about!
NEO KHAN DIGIFIER
The brother of Khan, Neo Khan Digifier serves primarily the same role here as his brother did. There’s not much I can really say about the guy since he’s a literal recolor of Khan, and I feel like a different shaped head might’ve made him more memorable.
Neo here, as well as all of the other monsters in this story, weren’t suits, but rather miniatures models made at Takara, and like with the original show, design duties once again fell upon Kazumitsu Akamatsu and Masayuki Fukagawa.
MAGMAGIRAS
Our first kaiju proper is Magmagiras, a fire-based saurian kaiju that attacks Tokyo. Magmagiras is your typical saurian monster, but he ain’t a bad one, and I love his mohawk of red spines on his head, and his two-fingered hands. He really does look like he stepped out of the show proper.
Magmagiras was originally intended to be based around an artificial sun, but it was decided to make the monster more of a traditional dinosaur beastie since he was the story’s first monster, and it’s tradition among the majority of Tsuburaya’s giant hero shows to throw a dinosaur monster out as the hero’s first opponent. Akamatsu wanted Magmagiras to look like a modified Flamelar, something that carried into the story itself with Neo creating Magmagiras from Flamelar’s data.
GRAVAS
Neo’s second monster, Gravas, turns Tokyo Bay into a sea of fire! Gravas is a great chimera of cephalopod and crustacean characteristics, and feels like a design that couldn’t quite work as a suit with his four legs. I love his blue, spike-covered body, dude looks like a tough customer!
While Gravas was always intended to be a crab, some other motifs were batted around for his design, such as a plesiosaur, with the crab claws being plesiosaur heads instead! While I love Gravas as he is, there’s a part of me that really wants to see something oddball like that.
MAD TEXAS
MAD TEXAS, god, what a name. This is the sort of character that if he appeared in the show proper, he’d definitely be one of my all time favorites. His design is just perfection, being a dragon wielding pistols and wearing jeans and cowboy boots. It’s a concept that’s so dumb that it loops back to being just badass. You don’t mess with Mad Texas.
Mad Texas was designed to sort of be the Shinobilar of this particular story, and Fukagawa designed him as a gunman to contrast Shinobilar’s ninja motif. Much like Magmagiras, it’s stated that Mad Texas was made from the data of Shinobilar.
GORGOBEROS
Gorgoberos here ain’t too bad, being a cool quadruped monster with all sorts of heads, limbs and spikes sticking out of his body. I really like his blood red skin, and if Magmagiras wasn’t in this story, I feel like he’d be a good fire monster to have running around.
During the design stage for Gorgoberos, it was assumed that the monster would’ve been formed from two different kaiju coalescing together, something that survives through the monster’s design. I’m a bit sad we didn’t get to see that idea come to fruition, but it’s understandable that they wouldn’t make two extra models for something so minor.
DEVILIGHT
If Mad Texas didn’t exist, Devilight here would definitely be my favorite of this bunch of freaks. Monsters made of eyeballs are always cool as hell, and Devilight here looks like Gan-Q’s cooler, older brother who’s into heavy metal and lighting things on fire.
In addition to just outright looking cool, Devilight’s main power is reviving dead kaiju, allowing Gilarus, Stealgan, Neo Metallus and Shinobilar to return and attack our heroes. He’s essentially Geronimon if he was made of eyeballs and not a dated stereotype.
GEIST DIGIFIER
Like his big brother, Neo is the final opponent for the two Hyper Agents, but instead of just getting a giant form that’s similar to his regular form, Neo absorbs the souls of the dead kaiju to become Geist Digifier, a fairly imposing final boss form. Geist Digifier doesn’t quite hit the mark as his components, but I do like how sleek this guy is, and in addition, his general body shape reminds me just a teeny bit of Metallus, which makes me wonder if this was a nod to Khan Digifier’s original giant form concept being made from the Metallus suit.
While these monsters never made it into a series proper, they did make a brief cameo alongside Gridman Sigma in the 2015 short Boys Invent Great Hero. The short by Studio Trigger would become instrumental in getting Trigger’s SSSS Gridman and SSSS Dynazenon to be made, continuing the saga. So while The Demon King’s Counterattack was just a magazine story, it did help keep Gridman alive for a little bit longer until it’s successful anime revival decades later.
Easter's Kaiju Kompendium 