Posted in: Comics | Tagged: death note, manga

The First New Death Note Collection In Fourteen Years

Published Sun, 31 Jan 2021 18:00:43 -0600

There hasn't been a new collection of the Death Note manga series in almost fifteen years. But next week will see the surprise publication in Japan of Death Note Short Stories.

Death Note Short Stories will collect, for the first time, a series of one-shot chapters spanning over 17 years of creation, as well as a series of comic strips. This will include Death Note a Kira Chapter, published last year, in the March 2020 issue of Jump SQ and focused on young student Minoru Tanaka who learns of the power of death through the shinigami Ryuk and who shares the front cover in the new collection, totalling 226 pages.

Death Note Short Stories will be published in Japan on the 4th of February. Viz Media publishes the manga in English, but there is no scheduled date yet for a translation.

The First New Death Note Collection In Fourteen Years

Death Note is written by Tsugumi Ohba and drawn by Takeshi Obata. First serialized in Shueisha's manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Jump from 2003 to 2006, the 108 chapters were collected and published into twelve volumes, selling over thirty million copies. The cartoon TV adaptation, a light novel and various video games spun out from the manga, as well as three live-action films. More recently, a television drama in 2015 was joined by a miniseries entitled Death Note: New Generation and a fourth film. An American film adaptation was released exclusively on Netflix in August and a sequel is in the works.

Death Note tells the story of Light Yagami, a teen genius who stumbles across a mysterious otherworldly notebook, which belonged to the Shinigami Ryuk, and grants the holder the supernatural ability to kill anyone whose name is written in its pages. The series centres around Light's subsequent attempts to use the note to carry out a worldwide massacre of individuals whom he deems morally unworthy of life, to change the world into a utopian society without crime, as a god-like vigilante named Kira. The efforts of an elite task-force of law enforcement officers to apprehend him and end his reign of terror, follow.

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