Platinum End From Death Note Creators Available as Digital Chapters

Platinum End

The newest series from Tsunami Ohba and Takeshi Obata, the creative team behind Death Note and Bakuman, is Platinum End. It’s available in English digitally, with a new 99-cent chapter monthly. You can get it on the Viz Manga app, at VIZManga.com, through the digital Weekly Shonen Jump, or at ComiXology.

Platinum End

It’s an odd story, with echoes of the “student affected by supernatural being with questionable motives” story of Death Note. Viz provided this description:

Mirai is a boy who has lost hope in the future. Can a fateful meeting with an angel turn his life around, or will he be plunged into further despair?

I’ve only read the first chapter so far; two are now available. The art is gorgeous, as expected, but the story is oddly downbeat. We meet Mirai, and he meets his angel, when he jumps off a building, because he doesn’t know what it is to be happy.

He’s graduating from middle school, and his parents are dead. His abusive aunt and uncle have made his life miserable (shades of Harry Potter), and he has no friends and no hope. The angel (whom I’m immensely suspicious of) grants him magical abilities inspired by freedom and love — only they bring about murder.

There are a lot of potential plot developments set up here, as the angel explains the way the world works to Mirai. It’s not just going to be about his psychological state, though. There’s also some kind of competition (of course, this ran in Shonen Jump) involving 13 angels finding potential humans to be “the next god”. It’ll be interesting to see if this catches on in the US, given that it’s got the same themes of power and death as Death Note



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