Title: Death Note Black Edition: Volume One
Author: Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 392
Rating 4.5/5
I’ve been meaning to get to this for ages, partly because I’ve heard good things and partly because I enjoyed the movies (the Japanese ones). I will admit, though, that watching the movies also put a little bit of a dampener on this and it’s probably what stopped it from getting a 5/5. Bit harsh really, because it’s through no fault of the author, but hey ho.
If you haven’t heard of Death Note before, it’s basically Japanese manga that follows the story of a kid called Light after he comes into the possession of a death note. He can write names inside it and those people will die under the conditions that he specifies and so he decides to become what amounts to a vigilante superhero, killing prisoners and other people that he deems deserved it.
Then it gets interesting. An adversary called L comes on the scene, and we as the reader find ourselves between the two of them. There’s a lot of stuff about morality, especially on the part of Light, and I also like the way that you can choose to side with either Light or L – or indeed to remain impartial and to just watch as the story develops.
For the first volume of a six volume series, I think it got off to a good start, although I can’t help wondering how far I’ll get in before I get to a point at which I no longer remember what’s about to happen. I also have an unusual problem to deal with, because the charity shop randomly had Volume One and Volume Three but not Volume Two. Although I have my eyes on a beautiful little box set of all six of them.
All in all then, I may be late to the bandwagon but Death Note definitely gets a thumbs up from me, and it deserves all the hype it gets. I can’t wait to read the rest of the series, and I also can’t wait to get my girlfriend into it too, seeing as she loves graphic novels. Or maybe I’m just making excuses because I want that box set. Who knows, eh?
