Bakuman is a comic about Death Note (Patreon)

 By Masha Zhdanova

In 2003, writer Tsugumi Ohba and illustrator Takeshi Obata collaborated for the first time on a manga called Death Note, serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump from 2003 to 2006. Death Note was a huge hit across demographics, later turned into an anime, stage play, and multiple live action adaptations. This article will discuss the manga in full, including spoilers for major twists and developments, so keep that in mind.

Death Note is about a teenage boy named Light Yagami who finds a notebook owned by a god of death (the titular Death Note) and uses it to kill criminals by writing their name in the Note. The series focuses on the battle of minds between Light (soon given the nickname Kira by the media) and the police and detectives trying to bring him to justice. 

After a short break from serialization, Ohba and Obata returned to the pages of Jump with Bakuman, a manga about making manga that ran from 2008 to 2012. Bakuman followed the adventures of artist Moritaka Mashiro and writer Akito Takagi (working under the joint pseudonym Muto Ashirogi) as they head towards their goal of making a manga popular enough to get adapted into an anime. If their manga becomes an anime and Mashiro’s crush Miho Azuki can voice the heroine in that anime, she’ll marry him.

If we ignore the romance subplot in Bakuman, we have a comic about a creative partnership that makes manga about morally grey and unconventional protagonists with a realistic art style. Therefore, Bakuman is a comic ruminating on the successes and failures of Death Note as a serialized manga, exploring what the creators wish they could have done differently, as well as what they didn’t realize was a problem in the first place.

First and foremost, Bakuman illuminates one of the most frustrating parts of Death Note: the ending. Death Note was focused on the battle of wits between Light and L and their complicated, layered dynamic. After Light succeeds in killing L in chapter 58, the story skips forward a few years to reveal that Light’s plans are working and the Japanese police can’t stand in his way. 

The characters that appear to take L’s place as Light’s intellectual opponents, Near and Mello, just aren’t as memorable as L was before them. In the process of rereading Death Note for this article, I tore through the first 60 chapters in a matter of days, but as soon as the next arc got going I found each chapter more and more of a drag to get through. Other Death Note fans agree: after L’s death, the story becomes repetitive, with the same puzzles and mind games playing out between Light and these new, less developed or interesting characters.

A popular theory, though unconfirmed as far as I can tell, is that Death Note was originally intended to end after L’s death. The comic took a two-month break from serialization after that chapter was published, which may indicate that Ohba needed more time to think of the next plot development. 

So what does Bakuman have to do with all this?

The final manga the protagonists in Bakuman make together, their best work that finally gets them the anime adaptation they’ve been dreaming of, is a “non-mainstream battle manga” about the battle of ideals and intellect between two characters (sound familiar?). Despite external pressure to keep the comic going for longer, the duo’s editor supports their decision to end the story the way they want to, after it’s been serialized for only one year for a total of 49 chapters.

Shonen Jump’s publishing model rewards long-running series. If something is popular, it could potentially continue forever. If a series drops in popularity enough, it may get cancelled, but for a manga that’s about to get an anime that will further boost its status, ending the comic wouldn’t make much sense.

Despite all of this, Takagi and Mashiro hold fast to their artistic vision, and manage to convince the editorial department that if they forced this story to keep going for longer, it wouldn’t be good anymore. The fictional manga-within-a-manga ends with both of these characters dying at the same time, neither winning or losing, equals to the end.

It’s easy to read this ending for Bakuman as a wish-fulfillment of what Death Note could have been if Ohba was allowed to end the story when he really wanted to. What if L had written Light’s name in the Death Note at the same time? 

Ohba couldn’t make a “director’s cut” of an already published and adapted comic, but he could write another comic about it.

The idea that authors should be able to end their series when they want to, no matter how popular they are, is a recurring theme in Bakuman. Earlier in the series, the protagonists’ main rival Eiji Nizuma announces that if his series Crow is ranked number one in the magazine’s surveys for ten weeks in a row, he will be allowed to end any series he wants. The other creators are upset by this, afraid Eiji would end their comics, but he surprises everyone by using this right to cancel his own Crow. 

At this point, Crow had been running for seven years straight. Eiji reveals to his friends that he’s always wanted to end his series when he wanted to, instead of letting it roll forward in perpetuity. They don’t all agree.

When Mashiro and Takagi’s editor Miura convinced them to do a gag manga out of their comfort zone, the duo decided to end the gag manga early because they were having such a difficult time working on it and it wasn’t as popular as their previous work. Though the editorial department wanted to keep this gag manga running as the only series appealing to the 12-and-under readership, Mashiro and Takagi stand firm in defense of their artistic vision and vow to create a new series that will be better than their current one in every possible way.

As Bakuman depicts it, if a manga falls in popularity for long enough, it gets cancelled. If it’s popular, the editors will discourage the author from ending it while it’s still profitable for them. For the manga artists in the comic, the artists that, one can assume, represent some part of Ohba and Obata themselves, making manga is more than a purely commercial venture. They have an artistic determination to tell the best story possible, and if that needs fewer, more densely-packed chapters and a dramatic ending, then that’s what they want to do. Eiji’s desire to end Crow at the peak of its popularity is seen as a brave decision by Mashiro and Takagi, though they both do their utmost to outdo him in the surveys and break his streak.

Bakuman is a comic about the making of Death Note itself. It’s a comic about two creative men who make manga for Shonen Jump about morally grey protagonists getting involved in twisted battles of wits with their clever rivals, and pushing back against an editorial department unwilling to let them tell their stories the way they want. 

In Bakuman, the protagonists always pull ahead eventually, no matter the obstacles that stand in their way. Ohba and Obata might not have been as lucky. 

Though Bakuman uses its meta structure to address some of the problems people had with Death Note, it reveals even more about the creators by the problems it fails to recognize as problems. Namely, the way the female characters are written in Death Note. 

Death Note received near-universal acclaim during its run for the clever twists and turns in the plot and the development of the main characters, but there was one character fans tend to be less fond of than the rest: Light’s girlfriend Misa Amane.

Misa is a popular model and Japanese idol who also obtains a Death Note, but she uses it to get close to Light and start dating him. Light doesn’t care about her at all, but Misa declares herself to be genuinely in love with Light and does everything she can to help him achieve his goals. However, she is depicted as silly, vapid, irrational and stupid, endangering everyone around her with her foolish feelings more than once throughout the story.

There are few female characters in Death Note at all: Light’s mother, who is a dutiful wife and mother and barely exists in the narrative; Light’s sister, who gets kidnapped and hit on by a police officer as comic relief; a handful of one-off women Light callously manipulates for his own purposes; and Kiyomi Takada, who we'll come back to later. But why is Misa, specifically, Like That?

Unlike Death Note, Bakuman has a number of named and prominent female characters that are present throughout the entire series. However the uncomfortable sexism of how these female characters are viewed by the narrative is obvious as early as chapter two.

“Azuki is smarter than Iwase because she instinctively tries to appeal to men,” Takagi is saying here. “The best thing for a girl is to get married and become somebody’s wife.” Obviously, this is a character voicing his opinions, but this is a character framed by the story so far as unusually smart and perceptive, so the reader is inclined to believe his opinions are correct.

Misa Amane in Death Note is therefore, in the view of the author, not as silly and stupid as she appears to the average reader, because she is motivated by her Feminine Purpose of being attractive to men and securing a husband.  

Misa wasn't the only girlfriend Light Yagami had in college, however. Kiyomi Takada was a classmate of Light's who scored almost as high as he did on his college exams, and considered herself to be his intellectual equal. She reappears much later in the story as the public spokesperson for Kira. Light uses her affections and her prideful nature to trick her into falling for him again. 

Light flatters Takada by telling her she’s smarter and better than Misa, while really thinking that all women are the same. 

When the two women meet up to talk about their relationship to Light, they are both only concerned with securing the affections of Light Yagami, with Misa bragging about an engagement and Takada dangling her connection to Kira over Misa’s head. Light convinces Takada to do whatever he asks of her by promising that he wants a future with her instead of Misa. She has no goals or motivations or desires beyond being with Light. Unfortunately for her, Light sees Takada as nothing more than a convenient pawn, using the Death Note to kill her the minute she stops being useful to him.

Takada's design and character are very similar to Iwase in Bakuman. Both meet the protagonists in school and reconnect with them later. Both are stubborn and intellectually snobbish, attracted to their crushes for their grades instead of their personality. But while Light pretends to feel affection for Takada so he can manipulate her, Takagi rejects Iwase for asking him to quit making manga.

Iwase becomes a manga author to compete with Takagi, but she struggles to keep her manga popular and is too stubborn to accept advice to improve it. Iwase is also the only major female character in Bakuman to end the series without a boyfriend or a husband. Clearly, in the 170-odd chapters since her introduction, Iwase never did become smart enough to learn how to appeal to men. 

Iwase is determined, but mostly she is shrill, angry and rude, all the way up until her last appearance in the manga. As far as the reader can tell, her only motivation for making manga at all is to prove that she’s equal to Takagi, not for any love of comics or storytelling. And yet, she is one of only two female manga creators that appear in Bakuman. Ko Aoki is a former shoujo mangaka who moves to Shonen Jump early in the series, and while she is initially cold and standoffish, she is cute and refined, and mellows out enough for multiple male characters to fall for her and shower her in affection. Aoki grows and matures, but Iwase is too stubborn to grow as a person. By the end of the series, Iwase’s appearances are reduced to her snapping at hapless male editors as a running joke.

This panel from chapter 21 explains why Misa in Death Note is so confusing and ambiguous. She’s there to be a cute girl for the boys reading the manga to admire, patiently helping the protagonist or increasing the tension by messing up. And she doesn’t need to be more than that for Death Note to work, because Death Note’s target audience is teen boys, not girls.

Bakuman justifies its own sexism by explaining in the story that their female characters only need to appeal to the male readership, and thus retroactively justifies the sexism in the creators’ previous work.

In Chapter 60, as Mashiro and Takagi are working on a new gag manga for Shonen Jump, their editor tells Takagi he’s not good at writing female characters.

Takagi talks with and meets with female mangaka Ko Aoki to exchange tips and tricks for writing romance and characters of the opposite gender, but what ends up happening in this arc is mostly Takagi explaining to Aoki how to draw appealing panty shots and how he started dating his girlfriend. Aoki gives very little advice on how women and girls think and act in return. Shonen Jump is a boy’s manga magazine, after all, appealing to girls is not very important. Female characters have no need for interior lives or unique motivations, their primary purpose is to be attractive to the male readers.

What girls appear in both Bakuman and Death Note are there to appeal to the male readership. By being a comic about the comic-creating process, Bakuman reveals that Death Note becoming a beloved series across demographics was not a deliberate move on the part of its creators.

Bakuman is a comic about the craft of making comics. It’s not autobiographical, but it is heavily inspired by the authors’ own lived experiences. The characters reference Death Note occasionally, especially in the earlier chapters, and the manga the protagonist pair make tends towards the unconventional cerebral cult-hit type of story that Death Note was. Bakuman gives the readers a peek behind the curtain into the nuts and bolts of creating serial manga: working with assistants, meeting editors, and coming up with storyboard after storyboard to create the best comic possible.

Not part of making shonen manga? Girls’ feelings.