Death Note Color Manga Image Dump and Inane Commentary

[sinnesspiel]

Wanting to both share requested color scenes in one place and post something of use besides picture dumps (there's a reason I don't Tumblr), I thought I'd try to offer some kind of useful input. Alas, I doubt I have any insight to offer that hasn't been considered by the large, active and cerebral fandom over the last decade. Death Note's not all that deeply steeped in Japanese culture or even particularly distinct character speech. No characters have speech styles that really stick out from what you'd expect by looking at them or listening to them. As far as I know Death Note's had perfectly fine subtitle track made available even if the dub script's earned some cringes, and I haven't heard of the manga translations being off to my knowledge. But when I mentioned the full color DN manga, it appears they have not been common knowledge though they've been available in Japan for a long while now. So in looking for something relevant to share, I did notice a few things the color helps to bring out. Some of them are actually interesting, some of them are pure crack.

We'll start with the crack, because it brings us to the matter of who the coloring artist is. It is not the original artist. It's a digital color job, though the pages that were colored by the original artists in JUMP ad splashes or art book pages use those. Having read through a modest portion of various JUMP series digitally colored and being able to point out some generally consistent points of style, I can say with confidence that not every color job is done with the same hard on (wet on?) for lips at work in Death Note. Light's lips get an unwarranted amount of color attention. Someone else is releasing the entire thing in color so I don't have to dig for particularly illustrative shots. Take a good look at the high def shots as they come out! All of the lip shot images here link to full res cuts. It's nost just a matter of a little gloss or shading. Humans have lip color. This wouldn't stand out if not for the facts that anime/manga/cartoonish arts tends not to have lip color unless it's lipstick and more importantly, most of the characters in Death Note do not have lip color.

I tend to breeze through Near's parts so I can't recall the frequency of him getting the lip focus, though my impression was they detailed his lips more often than L's as I do remember thinking "Ah, doing it to the faux-shouta too, I see" at more than two or three intervals.

To my amusement, neither L nor the girls' lips get this level of detail with the frequency some of the bishounen do. L's an oral fetishist's dream, yet I don't recall any colored lip shots at all; at best, some kinda glossy ones. I sound like I go looking directly at their mouths with an oral fixation of my own, but I'm telling you, it stands out because when they do it it looks different enough from how everyone else is colored to nab your attention. On girls it just looks like lipstick, so it's fine and even missable on them until you look for it.




On girls it doesn't stand out as much if it happens to look like lipstick sometimes. Takada gets lipstick in the scenes where manga tones indicated lipstick in the monochrome print (which is quite often) but tends to have a non-defined mouth otherwise and Misa's plain lipped even in most of her close up cutie shots. The above's about what we tend to get in lip color on Misa. Also, Misa never has blue eyes in the manga. I was oddly disappointed by this.

Speaking of lipstick... There is one single character whose lips are consistently portrayed with it, even without the manga having tones over them in the original to denote it, Depending on what day of the week it is I like or hate Mello. He's the herald of the crappier part of the series and sometimes I hate him in spite of finding him at least a little bit interesting in terms of personality. Other times he's not Near, and hey, that's something. Either way, I am far more likely to skip anything to do with him. A large part of my distaste for him probably comes from finding the entire missile stint and most of that kidnapping plot completely retarded. Nonetheless, Mello's lips stand out even in a quick flip past to the good parts. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves but for the record these aren't select, strange shots. The only time you see him without the corpse-purple lips are when he's a teenager (left). I feel no shame in laughing at his every panel. The boy wears lipstick. He's a genius on a level to make him a potential successor for L. He knows damned well the cost of looking as fabulous as he does and finds being laughed at by we plebs worth it, apparently.

As an aside, as if L wo Tsugu Mono didn't throw enough people with its sky blue haired Matt, if you go by the manga digital coloring, it seems Matt's official hair color is black/dark brown. At least, I assume that's how we're supposed to take the green. It's not too far off form Mikami's. In L wo Tsugu Mono, Matt's special ability is to be able to pull off a disguise with 100% certainty so maybe he just dyes his hair a lot as some weird part of his aptitude for dressing up. Playthroughs of the game recorded, just working on adding the subs so others can learn the menus and play, too!

Speaking of Mikami, lipstick boy not withstanding the artist seems to ultimately have the most consistent love of over detailing his lips. On many of these (particularly the first one) it's more prominent when in full size; again, it's all links.





While we're on the topic of Mikami, I roleplay him from time to time. Given he's a character we don't see much of and for whom the one considerable deviation from standard behavior is questionably the result of supernatural manipulation rather than a reflection of his personality, one has to headcanon some things. I don't really stick to headcanons much; they're something I'll whip up as a game context requires it and, as it's not canon, even if I enjoyed it I'll probably pass on picking it up in other games just to keep myself fresh. One consistent headcanon I do hold, however, is that despite being a Class Rep type (or rather, an actual class rep) he was into comics and cartoons and sentai and the like. Jokes about always calling out your attacks (Sakujo!) aside, he does have that black and white morality kids shows liked to have. In his flashback chapter in the panel where it discusses Mikami's childhood penchant for separating all into two categories, good and evil, right and wrong, enemies and allies, a good hunk of the middle left is made up of masked superheroe looking things and monster villains. One looks vaguely like Frieza or some Devil Man riff, something that looks like a Power Rangers Putty or a Dead Moon Circuis reject, a wolf monster, interspersed between rather adult fears like Middle Eastern terrorists, missiles, tanks and war tools, politicians, news victims, and starving people, some of which are potentially bound PoWs or traded slaves or some such.



I bring this up only to say I was disappointed that this got no color job other than a blue tint. I was hoping for a hint as to what kind of series he was into as a kid. He seems the type who would hate moral ambiguity, but quite a few kids series touched on it, and he certainly could not get through high school successfully, much less law school, if he couldn't dissect a work with some moral grays and see them for himself at least in the abstract. The Japanese legal system which he is a controlling arm of operates on the principal of moral grays, but we'll get into that in another post.

I am forced to admit, however, that he'd probably like the FMA Manga/the second anime and hate the 2003 version; in the new one, more or less every character is clearly delineated as good or bad by the end, moral ambiguity is virtually non-existent as most developed and all surviving characters who might have been bad learn their lesson with a good talking to as our conveniently consistently clean handed protagonists become authorial soap boxes whom the world warps for meet a flimsily supported narrative message for, just as Mikami supposes the world does (and should) for him. If ever I needed proof I played a monster, if ever I started to pity him and wish him happiness in a game, I need only remind myself that he'd probably like Brotherhood, and then the Schadenfreude can commence.

While sadly Mikami's choice of morally guiding entertainment remained the same beyond some shading added or removed, some things which were only black and white before became a lot more clear or interesting with color. The Chapter 7 title page looks incredibly cool. Having a few things colored in a fleshy pink turns it from a picture I glance over and ignore as Death Note gothic aesthetic to something I consider in context. My take was that it was showing a death or a dead-to-be (the criminal in the bus-jacking) manipulated like a puppet, a mechanical and organic tool. It highlights Light's use of a human being even if the character's not made remotely sympathetic compared to, say, Naomi who makes some plot relevant extrapolations based on it. Or, hell, it could just be a filler chapter cover to look cool. Lord knows there's enough of that about. Speaking of Misora Naomi, she's always lovely. No, no, no, that wasn't the point... It was interesting to see how they differentiated between brown-black, blue-black, grey-black, hair, leather and other textures. As she was thematically in black in mourning per the artist originally, it stands out well on her. Granted, she's also in black when he's alive. Still, the bright colors on her photo with Raye sets up a nice contrast to highlight that she's not always like this.

The Shinigami eyes are also striking. In the anime we got that but seeing it in the manga art too is no doubt an enhancement. As well as they managed to denote Shinigami eyes even in black and white with their widened eyes, perfectly circular pupils and irises and with shaded whites, having them be a brighter color serves the purpose even better.

Next time we'll cover some Japanese New Years traditions in Death Note and other cultural seasonal and visual cues the series uses to mark the passage of time, the importance of tie color coordination, watch brands, the Japanese legal system (with focus on the prosecution system), and a few differences in colors between the anime and the colored manga. I didn't actually intend to make such an inane post about nothing, but the lipstick look kept irking me while I combed through for something to actually talk about.