Death Note, Vol. 1: Boredom

My very first encounter with Manga was truly mind-blowing.

Just imagine having a Death Note, a note belonging to one of the gods of Death.

All you have to do is write a name in it while picturing the person's face, and BAM, they die.

It's a story that makes it extremely difficult to pick a side.

I mean, I would probably do the same as Light and try to get rid of those who make life a living hell, like killers, torturers, rapists, sadists, and child abusers.

Damn them all, especially here in Egypt where the law is often slow and not always fair. But at the same time, is that really fair?

Oh, and I might have bigger plans, but not now. Let's get back to the story.

Light, a prodigy student, answers his prayer to escape boredom by finding a Black Note, a Death Note, complete with its instructions.

And being a good person, he knows how to use it to the best of his ability. I find myself mostly agreeing with his ideas. Does that make me a bad person? Maybe.

The Death Note originally belongs to Ryuk, a Shigami, a god of Death. He deliberately lost his Death Note in the human world because he too felt a strong sense of boredom and wanted to leave the land where the gods of Death hung around.

BUT as hundreds of criminals and convicted murderers start dying, the Police of Japan, the "NPA," begin searching for the one responsible for this strange phenomenon. And for this mystery, they need a genius detective.

Enter L, an anonymous detective who is super smart and highly effective in solving mysterious cases. Now, they will both do their best to catch the one they call the "Murderer." But will they succeed?

The first volume, Boredom, has 7 chapters. Each chapter is truly amazing and fast-paced, catching my attention even before I finished the first chapter. With Light's magnificent discovery, the fun of the neutral companion, the Shigami with his super cute features, and the surprise in chapter 3, Family (I won't spoil it for you now). Then L came along, and it became a game of Cat and Mouse. Both are super smart, both are righteous, and both think they represent JUSTICE.

So, pick a side. I know it's hard.

This is truly a nice comic, Manga, and it's a great start for me into this world.

Mohammed Arabey

from 9 February 2016

to 11 February 2016

PS: This is half the review of the edition I read, The Black Edition. The full review will be in Arabic when I finish Vol. 2 too.

4 1/2 stars

When I initially wrote in my review of Battle Royale that there were only two manga series I truly enjoyed, it dawned on me that Death Note was in desperate need of a review. I'm not a die-hard manga fan. I'm aware that some people are crazy about it. I've attempted to start the most commonly adored ones like Naruto, InuYasha, Fullmetal Alchemist, etc., but I was left believing that I would never come to appreciate these graphic novels. Death Note was a complete accident that I discovered one day while browsing YouTube. I stumbled upon the first episode and watched out of curiosity. Then I watched the next and the next until I'd seen the whole thing and knew I had to read the novels too. Both are brilliant. The entire series has only one flaw for me, which is why I deducted half a star from the rating. I'll discuss this issue later.


Just so you know, this will be a review of the series as a whole since I'm not going to review every single volume, but I promise to omit any spoilers.


Here goes: Death Note is brilliant. It's incredibly intelligent and will challenge your views on justice and power. The challenges it presents are far from simple. I guarantee that you'll change your mind multiple times during each volume. You'll switch sides constantly. One minute you'll think Light Yagami is evil, and the next you'll think he's a hero. This is a very complex moral story about right and wrong, about how power corrupts, and about what constitutes a just punishment for the wicked.


Light Yagami is an over-achieving student who is fed up with the world around him. Day by day, he hears the news reports listing murders, rapes, and other atrocities committed by human scum. When a Shinigami (Japanese death god) drops his death note into the human realm one day, Light Yagami picks it up and holds in his hands the power to kill people just by writing their names and picturing their faces while doing so. He starts out with the noblest of intentions - to rid the earth of the foulest criminals. But there's a price to pay for playing god. As people start to realize that someone is murdering criminals and disregarding Japan's legal methods, questions about justice begin to surface - is the killer doing the world a favor, or is he showing a complete lack of respect for human rights?


When more people begin to stand in Light's way, he is forced to write the names of more and more individuals - some criminals, some not. The power granted to him begins to change him, pushing him deeper into his obsession with this god-like role. All the while, Ohba maintains a brilliant pace and throws up numerous obstacles and challenges. This story will truly appeal to those who want something to think about and are tired of reading novels with the same old pattern.


On top of all this, Death Note has possibly my favorite detective of all time. When the Japanese police force realizes that they are unqualified to catch the killer, they appeal to L Lawliet for help. Now, I don't want to say too much about L because I could spoil it, but he's intelligent, lovable, brilliant... I doubt you'll be able to resist loving L Lawliet. And this is one of the things I love most about the series: there's no clear line between good and bad. The novel pits Light and L against each other. They have very different ideas about justice and right and wrong, but the brilliance of it is that you can see it from both perspectives. In a way, you find yourself on both of their sides.


So why did I knock off half a star? Because I dislike the way women are portrayed in Death Note. At the end of the day, this series was made to mainly appeal to young adult males. There's no heroine, and very few main female characters appear throughout the whole thing. Also, the most central female character is Misa Amane, and she is beautiful but useless. She is silly and fickle, and she is mostly regarded with contempt by the other characters. This would probably annoy me more if the rest of the story wasn't so excellent, but it is, it really is.


You should read it. Or watch it. Each episode is only 20 minutes long. Why not give the first one a try and see if it's something you could like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CheI5D...

Death Note is an ingenious concept for a crazy, disturbing tour de force manga that manages to be appealing to close to all audiences of horror, dark fantasy, mystery, crime, philosophy, and humor together.

Who created it? Well, that nobody knows who Tsugumi Ohba really is is freaking funny and adds an extra bonus to the mystery of and cult around the series. For an average series, this might be no real big selling and advertising argument, but because of how big and brilliant this thing is, it adds an extra arcane bonus level.

What is right and what is wrong? Ok, it might be a bit of an overreaction to kill people, but maybe they would have someday killed others themselves, so it's maybe some kind of good preemptive policing and self-justice that's perfectly fine? Probationers would have no work anymore and who cares about the differentiation of how high the reoffending rate really is for each case and crime. But seriously, the big ethical, moral question behind this is how someone would use that power for which kind of justice.

Imagine being able to not just kill murderers and monsters, but everyone. Let's say people at work who could get the promotion, friends, partners, family members, maybe even kids. So with great power comes great responsibility and the protagonists are used to make the reader think about justice. Because they have completely different opinions and worldviews, their argumentation which criminal is to kill for what makes it a roller coaster ride and ethics class example fun with the reader permanently being mindblown. Because obvious cases change, new evidence occurs, something completely changes the state of evidence, and one is confused about what is right and wrong anyway.

This series doesn't grow too big because it was built to perfectly end. I still haven't read just close to all of it, thank and hail Ryuk and the flying spaghetti monster for that, but I assume that trying to put all in just a few parts increases the quality, and avoids a great series crashing to redundancy and at best average quality, by growing to inappropriate length.

I don't know the anime and movie, but possibly many readers will get extra kicks out of it. What the ratings are saying, the anime is a pretty good bet, while the movie seems to be some kind of fandom war territory. One of these cases where it's impossible to say if the movie sucks and if they ruined a perfect series, or if it was just impossible to live up to the expectations of the fandom.

Outstanding for the manga and anime genre, it's pretty disturbing, sick, and absolutely not what many associate with the stereotypical manga and anime features, some find a bit too extremely sweet and thereby annoying. That it's dealing with some pretty deep topics and has both great art and writing makes it one of the most popular milestones of not just manga, but also graphic novel history.

Try Full Metal Alchemist and Battle Royale too if you like that kind of stuff.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

\n  “There is no heaven or hell. No matter what you do while you’re alive, everybody goes to the same place once you die. Death is Equal.”  \n

Shall we begin?* Ryuk laughs in background *


Before delving into this, a small piece of advice. If you don't have the time to read the manga, please watch the anime. It consists of only 37 episodes, each 20 minutes long, and is available for free on YouTube with English subtitles.

Assuming you have watched it, as this review is going to be a spoilery affair!

One more thing, if you think that Death Note is for teens obsessed with the idea of being smart and killing people to prove their worth, please just go away! I have spent enough time defending myself!

It is truly outstanding and beyond description!! There is no other Anime/Manga quite like Death Note, and I am more than willing to debate this with anyone.

The story is truly unique. A notebook descends from the sky, and the human who writes a name in it has the power to kill the individual pictured in their mind (I have omitted the details that you don't need to know). This presents the readers with a highly debatable theme based on morals and justice. Yagami Light, who acquires this power to kill, uses it in the hope of creating a utopia in which he is god. Criminals, and only criminals, are to be punished in the pursuit of a perfect society. However, is this right? Is it just to kill those who have done wrong and will do wrong again? Can they be reformed? Death Note poses such questions to the readers, questions that do not have easy answers.

This series challenges the viewers' morals, and for that, it is highly deserving of praise.

Moving on to the characters, unpopular opinions, and fan-based theories :-

✏L lawliet :- He is my favorite character in the series, and it is his intelligence, quirkiness, and everything he represents. Not to mention his smile and his love for ice cream.

Bitch, I cried when he died! Okay!

\n  Kira is childish and he hates losing... I am also childish and I hate to lose. That's how I know.”  \n

✏Light*i don't give a fuck about anything*Yagami
:- My second favorite character. Now, here's the thing. I love L about 55% and Light about 45%, and I can't decide whether I am on Team Kira or Team Anti-Kira.
He is incredibly intelligent and smart beyond my imagination, but eventually, he met his end because it was necessary. However, if in some alternate world Light were to live, I honestly wouldn't have a problem with it. Period (Don't fight me. I've had enough discussions about this with my mum)

\n  \"This world is rotten, and those who are making it rot deserve to die. Someone has to do it, so why not me?”  \n

Now, my next favorite characters are Ryuk, Mello, Misa, and Near (in that order).
I love Mello so much, and I have great respect for Near. People who say that after L's death, the series became boring and Near wasn't that interesting, I agree to some extent. But it was necessary to introduce someone, and Near never claimed to be L. He always referred to himself as L's successor!!!!

Unpopular opinion :- I like Misa
▪She is smarter than people think.
▪ She withstands torture better than anyone else.
▪ Her love for Light knows no bounds.
▪She adds color and humor to the manga (bet you laughed at her silliness)
▪And not to forget her fashion sense!

Now, I am a believer in the most famous Death Note fan theory that Light becomes a shinigami at the end (if you do too, let me know)

In conclusion, according to me, Death Note is one of the most iconic manga/anime I have ever read/watched. There is simply nothing like it, and I highly recommend everyone to watch/read it at least once in their lifetime.

It will make you question things you never would have thought about. Because deep down, we all know that we would have done the exact same thing if we had received the Death Note.

\n  \"In the end, there is no greater motivation than revenge.”\n  
\n

Thank you!

I don't read a great deal of manga. However, on a whim, I picked up the first few books of this series, and then promptly purchased all the rest so that I could complete the series.

Short version? I truly relished it.

Longer version: Here are some thoughts in no particular order....

~ It's a great illustration of how you don't require a plethora of crazy and fantastic events to create a captivating piece of Speculative Fiction. In this series, there's a notebook, and if someone writes your name in it, you die. It doesn't seem as if that would be sufficient to sustain twelve graphic novels' worth of story, but it most definitely does.

~ These books violate a lot of my general guidelines regarding what constitutes a good story. The vast majority of the action involves people thinking about things. That's a definite "no" in terms of storytelling, and I would have thought it would be a double "no" in a visual medium like this. But it works. You can't dispute that.

~ I believe the series took a definite downturn two-thirds of the way through. It felt to me as if the story had reached a natural conclusion, yet it just continued to push forward, disregarding that.

I've witnessed this occur before with a significant number of successful US comics (and a few series of novels). And while it's nice to see that this isn't a problem exclusive to US publishing, I still have a profound aversion to stories that don't end properly. Especially so if they give the impression of being infinitely prolonged simply because the author refuses to let go, or because the publisher wishes to keep selling more books.

Amazingly complex story for a manga, suspenseful... dark... it's a classic!

However, upon rereading this manga after graduating high school in 2017, it unfortunately doesn't seem to stand the test of time. The portrayal of the female characters is extremely poor. They lack depth and are often reduced to one-dimensional stereotypes. Moreover, all the characters make truly terrible choices throughout the story.

Light, L, Mello, and Near are presented as the only "smart" characters in the series. But this is achieved not by making the actual main characters interesting or brilliant in a genuine sense. Instead, it's done by making all the other characters just ridiculously one-track minded. This simplistic approach detracts from the overall quality of the manga and makes it less engaging upon closer inspection.

May luck be our savior from the gods succumbing to boredom. For if they do, heavens know what chaos will ensue.

Alas, it seems that everyone eventually reaches a state of utter boredom, with each day being a more warped and insignificant replica of the previous one. As the saying goes, “Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.” And when the gods get bored, they transform people into their playthings. After all, what does a fleeting human life mean to an immortal being? The true horror lies in one human killing another of their own kind. No wonder it is said that “this world is another planet's hell.” The mortal world is rotten to the core, and we are all alone. It is high time for someone to take matters into their own hands.

Enter Ryuk, a Shinigami who, out of pure boredom, dropped his death note into the human world. Little did he anticipate how fascinating things were about to become. He is about to have the time of his life, all at the expense of the human world.

Meet Yagami Light, the top student in Japan. He is ambitious, brilliant, and ruthless. He possesses the will, the conviction, and the courage. And now he has the means. He will not allow anything to stand in his way of creating a just world inhabited solely by good people. After all, the end justifies the means.

Then there is L, a world-renowned genius detective. He is calculating, strategic, and driven. He will not let anything hinder his goal of creating a just world where the right to live is not violated. He is not protecting criminals; he is safeguarding the world from a human with absolute power. For, as history has shown, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

When these worlds collide, who can predict the destruction they will cause? The pieces are set, the players are prepared. This is a deadly game, and the winner takes all. But beware, player, of losing yourself in the game. You might lose sight of what you are fighting for. After all, many who fought monsters ended up becoming monsters themselves, and “if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” The bloodshed is about to commence. Welcome to the opening of the world's deadliest game. But at least, life is no longer dull.

Prosto za ne poverovati, ali strip u kojem se slabo sta desava i gde u sustini imamo samo gomile price, ne bi smeo ni priblizno da bude zabavan ili da te vuce.

However, Gosn Ohba has managed this extremely well.

So now I'm sitting here and waiting for the continuation.

It's quite remarkable how he has taken a seemingly uninteresting concept and made it engaging.

The way he presents the stories and the characters is truly captivating.

Even though there may not be much happening on the surface, there is an underlying charm and appeal that keeps you hooked.

I can't wait to see what he has in store for us next in this strip.

It's like a mystery that unfolds with each new installment, and I'm eager to discover the secrets and surprises that lie ahead.

Gosn Ohba has definitely proven himself to be a talented creator, and I'm looking forward to more of his work.