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 Death Notes: The First Names (or at least a couple of them...)
Written by Barb Lien-Cooper
I think that my husband Park and I were two of the first fans to notice Death Note in the USA, but it was totally by accident. It happened because I'm such a fan of Asian horror films. I've seen all of the best of them (Tale of Two Sisters, Dorm, etc.) and many of the worst of them (I'm not even going to mention any of those). Well, like all good things, the eventual supply of good Asian horror films came to an end. As I was looking through the dregs of what was left at my local video store, almost out of the sky itself, plopped Death Note. Now, as I said, Death Note hadn't even appeared as a manga in America yet. It was just a live action horror film that my husband and I liked but weren't in love with. But something about the concept of good vs. evil and life vs. death made us agree that we'd look into the manga that inspired the film if it ever hit the US. We looked online and while kids all over Europe and Asia were going Death Note crazy, it didn't look like it was ever going to hit the US. "Aw, c'mon, it's so controversial! I mean, it's cool, but there's a Death Note cult out there. Do you really think any company will bring it over here? Forget it!" I said to Park, in one of my rare instances of being totally, totally off base in one of my predictions about industry trends.
So we forgot about the manga that we were jonesing for because of the film. We didn't think of it again until about the third volume of Death Note came out in manga form. Thank you, Viz! My husband received about seven volumes of Death Note for his birthday that year. And it was one of the best gifts I ever got him. We were both addicted to it from the second were started reading it. Yeah, we did jump ahead a bit to where the film left off, but from that point, we were hooked. Death Note is an intellectual puzzle, a nail biter, a far fetched supernatural horror that goes strangely and further afield in each volume...
It's profound and silly and smart and dumb and logical and stupid and astounding and full of improbabilities and...
Death Note is just cool. I've got no other words for it.
As the old song goes, "Whatever you've got, it's got me."
So after being ahead of the wave of Death Note love, we sort of missed the first crest of the manga by a few volumes. But at that time, while Death Note was getting more and more attention every volume, it wasn't the "you're not cool if you're not reading this" phenom it later turned out to be.
In fact, with the exception of my husband, I could not find a single male Death Note fan amongst my circle of acquaintances. Instead, I found lots of female fans, some of which were more shojo than shonen in their tastes, some of which were shonen fans like I usually am. I knew that Death Note was my gender's neat little secret when I mentioned to a busy shojo editor I knew that I loved Death Note. I expected to be blown off, but instead she said, "Yeah, isn't it good???"
It's not the cute boys of Death Note that got the gals. It's not Misa Misa's bondage cutie cutting edged fashions. What Death Note has that attracted the females I talked to:
1/ A terrific supernatural theme
2/ Great art (by the genius behind Hikaru No Go's art, no less)
3/ Smarts and lots of 'em
Well, eventually, Cartoon Network got ahold of the anime, and suddenly guys were all over it like lint on a cheap suit. That didn't bother me, as I believe that geek culture should be INCLUSIVE, not EXCLUSIVE in the way that American comic book culture so often is. But I think what may be lost in the craze is that, while not an exclusively-female-oriented manga by any means, a lot of the readers that discovered it first were female ones. Okay, I'm sure that a lot of guys read the Death Note manga before the anime series. I'm just telling you what I observed. I'm afraid that so many guys enjoying it now will think that isn't not for gals, but nothing could be further from the truth.
But why does it matter that when it comes to Death Note fans, you'd be well advised to cherez la femme? Because so many people have no idea what female readers want. And yet it's so clear, if one looks from the right perspective...
While the Death Note phenom first started passing from the female manga fans to anime fans in general, American comics decided to try and capture the hearts of said readers by launching a comics imprint called Minx. Minx was mostly a bunch of slice-of-life graphic novels with cartoony art that in some instances seemed meant to pass for manga. Librarians loved Minx. You can find Minx titles in just about every library in the nation, I think. Unfortunately, librarians often seemed to be its greatest fans. To be blunt, Minx did not succeed.
If you look online, you can find a number of great blog entries about why Minx failed. I won't go too into the details right now. But I will tell you that while Minx was trying to attract females with slice-of-life comics, I did some investigating of my own. The New York Observer said in an article last year about young adult female book audiences that supernaturally-themed books were about the only ones selling big time (Vamps, Twilight, etc.). I also asked a manga editor or two what sold. The answer: action-adventure, magical adventures, supernaturally-themed works (but not strict horror per se), and romantic comedies. What didn't sell? Pure slice-of-life titles.
But in a way, it was information I already knew. You want a geek girl audience? Dump the preconceptions about what girls like and write something supernatural like Death Note. But if a woman had written Death Note and taken it to Minx, would they have said "just what we need!" ...or would she have been told that female readers don't like death, action, intellectual puzzles, or adventures? I don't say this because I had a Death Note in my back pocket, but just because I've had so many dealings with the American comics industry... which, in general, often still thinks girls wear pink pinafores, shriek at the sight of blood, and are waiting to be rescued by the handsome prince.
My husband recently went to the New York Comics Convention. There, he saw Minx titles which were already cut-outs, marked for clearance. He then sent me, using his cell phone, a picture of a young woman cosplaying at NYCC as Near from Death Note (if you're reading this and you see your picture, we know Park said that he might use it for his internet column, so hope you don't mind! If you do, let us know!).
I have her picture on rotation on my desktop slide show. Every time I see her, I think, "You're the NEW face of women in comics."
Comics publishers ignore the New Face at their peril because, metaphorically speaking, she has a kind of Death Note in her Sanrio backpack and she's not afraid to use it: it's called a checkbook.
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