I first bought the volume 1 in April 2002 (according to my Amazon account) and the rest soon after because I was a big fan of the film. For some reason I only got to half way through volume 3. I don't remember why but the whole series then sat on a shelf waiting for me to get around to reading it again (after five years I chose to read from the start again). With it's daunting size and such things as final year projects and such to distract my attention I never got around to reading it again.
It is a lot of paper.
The reason why I felt I could just sit and read it is because a few months ago I read the entire of Death Note in about two weeks. Pertly because it was being made into a film and I had seen the impressive trailer, but also once I started grinding through the story I found the whole experience to be very rewarding. Normally I would pace myself, but on this occasion I just read (a lot) and found the story flowed much better with fewer breaks.
So being unemployed as I am I thought it was about time I paid my respects to the original manga that spawned the film I favour so greatly. If it wasn't for a certain Oblivion Expansion I would have gotten through it quicker, but I was quite surprised at how utterly different the manga is to everything that the film is. The manga has way more characters, happens over a much longer period and is a lot more epic in nature. I don't want to spoil anything about the plot, but if the film was converted to a graphic novel I am fairly sure it would be less than 400 pages. So even if you have seen the film a thousand times the manga is well worth reading and will enhance your understanding of the film's plot. And if you have read the manga, go see the film because it isn't an adaptation at all, but rather a different telling of the same overplot.
While I was reading I spotted this little pain:
The guy is being asked to lift a stone with his physic powers as training. As soon as I read it I thought of the Wachowski Brothers and wondered if they had seen that too.
Anyway the manga is the best graphic novel I have ever read and for some reason I thought it would be interesting to record how must time i spent reading each volume as I went:
Volume 1 (359 pages)
1 hour
47 minuets
32 seconds
Volume 2 (301 pages)
1 hour
15 minuets
52 seconds
Volume 3 (282 pages)
1 hour
18 minuets
37 seconds
Volume 4 (394 pages)
2 hours
5 minuets
5 seconds
Volume 5 (413 pages)
1 hour
59 minuets
38 seconds
Volume 6 (433 pages)
1 hour
10 minuets
48 seconds
Total pages 2,182
Total reading time 9 hours 36 minuets and 32 seconds.
X/5
It's a masterpiece I can't simply give it a score out of five!!!
