Review: Death Note, Vol. 1: Boredom

Death Note, Vol. 1: Boredom by Tsugumi Ohba
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Thanks to the recent launch of the Netflix trailer drop of their upcoming Death Note, I thought it was abut time to re-read the original manga that started it all. I was in my teens when I read this story for the first time, and it was a bit odd to realize that it had been 10 years since then. Not that I was ignorant of this fact, but in terms of media that you enjoy, it can be be a moment of "...really?" when you remember the age of it. This is largely to do with how the property sticks in your own memories - the more you enjoy something, the stranger it seems that it's been so long since it was originally released.

With all of this in mind, it surprises me that I felt like the first volume of the Death Note saga was surprisingly slow. Not that it feels like a bad thing, but through the various adaptations of the story, I had gotten used to it being slightly faster paced. This draws out our first meeting of Light - we don't seen L's face in this volume - and allows us to slowly get to know this sociopathic (I am not entirely sure but in terms of his attitude towards humanity, the word fits) teenager who seeks to rid the world of anyone he considers unworthy be it through crime of just laziness.

I once read an interview with the creators that described the manga as being a "Sherlock Holmes story from Moriarty's point of view." I... would have to agree with that statement. In the words of Jake Peralta: "cool motive, still murder." Just because Light is initially only focusing on big crimes and exacting his particular brand of justice does not give him the right to do this. While a little more education on the Japanese judicial system shows that big cases only seems to get media coverage in cases in which they are sure of conviction, this... still doesn't give Light the right to what he's doing.

It's a dark irony that I find embedded in the first volume that the person who feels he is standing in judgement of the rest of the world has made himself the worst criminal in the world through this judgement. I know, this is something I should have already known, and I did, but it seems like only now that I'm picking up on the dark humor of the situation.

First volume down, 11 more to go.

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