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Still reading Death Note; am now up to part 46. If you’re coming in late to the Death Note party, here’s the facts:
1. It’s a manga, that is being constantly scanned and translated and is available on the web in these scanlations.
2. It can be read using CDisplay, an image display piece of software. (To get CDisplay, go to this site. )
3. It is actually very intriguing and suspenseful, as well as often funny.
4. There is some quite well-written fan fiction on the net from the series.
5. It is *very* slashy.
6. It is incomplete; it has been scanlated up through part 53.
7. The story (IMHO) weakens after the first long arc, but is still very much worth reading.
8. There is a sort of prequel/alternate version that was published by the author; find it at Toriyama's World.
9. Toriyama's World has an alternate manga viewer found here.
For those interested, scans can be downloaded on the web from here.
Thoughts:
It was best through around the first 20-30 parts. The weird favoritism/hatred thing that so often shows up in respect to female charas comes in hard by eps 40-on, making Misa seriously awful as a story device. The treatment of a female chara often unhinges the moral universe of a story, which for me in this case distracts from the previously edge-of-seat dramatic tension. Nevertheless, it may be downgraded from A class, but it is still absorbing and intriguing. And I still adore L and am freaked/fascinated by Raito-kun. The side-charas are well-drawn, and then the art… I love the expressive details included.
Actually, I’m also finding the fan fiction (when canonical) to be as addicting as the manga. I think that, once the manga is finished, I’ll be interested in uncanonical and AU stories, but for now I really want an expansion on the subtext in the story. The L/Raito stuff is what I’m most interested in, but I would like to see sub-character stuff as well.
The fannish reactions to Kira are freaking me out, though.