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| Death Note; Vol. 1 | |
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| Topic Started: Dec 10 2005, 03:45 PM (952 Views) | |
| Niko | Dec 10 2005, 03:45 PM Post #1 |
Traveller
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This was one of my most anticipated manga buys for this year. I didn't know anything about it, but it had super "buzz". So far, it's living up to the hype. Light Yagami is an extremely intelligent high school student. One day, he discovers a notebook with the words "Death Note" on the cover. Inside are directions explaining that the book can be used to kill other people. When a name is written in the book, that person will die. Light can't resist experimenting and finds that the book really works. Shortly thereafter, he is visited by Ryuk, the shinigami (death god) who original owned the book. Ryuk was bored in his world and dropped the book in the human world on purpose to see what would happen, but now he is bound to Light until Light no longer has the book (or Light dies). With Ryuk along as an observer, Light sets out to use the Death Note to rid the world of criminals, put the fear of death into non-criminals so they don't do anything bad, and just generally rule the world. It isn't long before the governments of the world notice that their criminals are dropping dead, and an interpol task force is formed to find the person responsible. The head of this task force is the mysterious "L", a never-seen, brilliant agent who is called in to deal with cases that are too tough to be handled by average police. This begins a game of cat-and-mouse between "L" and Light. L is tasked with finding Light based on nothing more than a series of mysterious deaths, and Light really wants to find out who "L" really is so that he can write his name in the Death Note and eliminate that threat from his trail. With both men being so absolutely brilliant, the game gets quite twisted in a Sherlock Holmes/Moriarty sort of way...made more interesting by the fact that we're mainly seeing the Moriarty side of the story. Light is the protagonist, but any pretense of him being a truly *good* person goes out the window fairly early when he realizes that he may just have to kill his own family if they ever find out about the Death Note. There's also the added complication that Light does not actually know all the rules that govern the use of the Note. Ryuk is tremendously entertained by Light's shenanigans, but he has no actual loyalty to him, so he doles out little bits of information about the note as whim strikes him. So a lot of this volume is also centered on Light learning some of the boundaries and limitations of what he can do with the note. So far, this is a very intelligent intrigue sort of series. If you enjoy whodunnits or other detective-type stories (the "Spiral" anime comes to mind as another example), I'd highly recommended. The twists and turns of how Light confounds L's hunt (and how L comes to his conclusions about Light) are tremendously fun. 
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9:30 PM May 20