Manga Review: Death Note: Volumes One - Three

Though they may be a bargain in comparison to most American comic purchases these days, manga graphic novels can still take a chunk of change if you're following any series to the end. Take a limited mini-series like Battle Royale: 15 volumes long – by no means an unreasonable length considering the amount of story in the series – and, at $9.95 a volume, you've spent $150 just to get the full work. A not inconsiderable entertainment expense.

Which is this writer's way of explaining why he hasn't been doing as much new manga exploration in the past half-year as he’d like. Just keeping up with the series I'm already following has required some thoughtful budgeting. I haven't stopped my exploring entirely, but I have been much less profligate. I did latch onto one of Viz/Shonen Jump's Advanced manga series, Tsugumi Ohba & Takeshi Obata's Death Note, and have read the first three translated volumes.

Rated "T+," for the "Older Teen" reader, the series is a dark fantasy about a teen-ager named Light Yagami who is the recipient of a notebook that’s been dropped outside his school by a grinning, fanged creature called a Shinigami death god. The death god, Ryuk, has deliberately deposited the notebook on Earth just to see what'll happen: he's bored with his usual routine, so he tags along with Light, visible only to those humans who've also handled the notebook. ("Humans are a riot!" the demon thinks.)

With Light, he's definitely lucked(?) onto someone who will make things happen. Smart, athletic and more than a little smugly judgmental, the high school brain sees his possession of the Death Note as his opportunity to remake the world into a better place.

Ryuk's notebook, we quickly learn, has profound properties: writing the name of anyone whose face you can visualize, you can change both the time and manner of their death. After testing it on a killer holding hostages in a nursery school (talk about stacking the deck!), Light decides to use the book on a full sweep of criminals who have gotten away with serious crimes. "I'll make this a world inhabited only by people I decide are good!" he asserts, but it isn't long before our would-be world savior steps outside this noble declaration.

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is a Books editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy comic fat acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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