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Death Note

Author: Tsugumi Ohba (writer), and Takeshi Obata (artist)

Volumes: 12 English & Japanese (Complete at 108 Chapters)

Publisher: Shonen Jump [click HERE for digital chapters]

Death Note is such an impactful series, the comic manages to tell a gripping and thought provoking tale that no adaptation (even the anime) has really been able to match. This is another one of those stories where you can sort of leave with the wrong idea if the subject matter isn’t handled properly, and unfortunately for Death Note, its adaptations all portray Light Yagami as more of a misunderstood hero of the people instead of the villain that he actually is.

From what we know of any country with the death penalty, it tends to lead to increased crime rates rather than lower, and despite all the flaws of a legal system, it still has checks and balances in place that one man acting on their own isn’t going to have. Light starts the story with a feeling of powerlessness when seeing good people suffer, but becomes corrupted by the power he obtains.

The death note is a book where names written within will lead to the deaths of the people that belong to those names, there are rules to how the book works, as well as what can and can’t be done, but long story short it’s a weapon with a permanent, quick, and effective outcome.

My favourite character of the entire story is that of L. I like eccentric characters, but rarely do we get to see them given any real weight in the narrative, and even less so do we see them played straight with their various ticks and habits. Second favourite character being the death god, Ryuk, who rather than providing our protagonist with some altruistic goal in giving Light the Death Note, is simply experimenting with the book to see what happens to it in the hands of various people.

My only real complaint about the comic is that the series gets a little convoluted once a specific skip in time has taken place, but to go into detail here would be more than a little bit of a spoiler. The ending is still bone chilling, but some of the build up does sort of feel a little like padding/ filler.

The thing that makes the original comic so important though, is that everything is handled with a whole lot more care than every adaptation after, and if you’ve only seen the adaptations before now, you owe it to yourself to experience the original story.