20 Absolutely Masterful First Pages Of Comics

2. Death Note Vol. 1

Death Note is not like other manga... or really like anything else at all. It's a story of elaborate mental chess games that sometimes go on for hours and a terrible power sure to corrupt almost any human who uses it.

But before we get into all that, we have a simple two frames showing Ryu the demon and Light the human. Light, the story's antihero, is already murmuring about the state of the world, and he will spend the series believing that all his actions stem from a desire to improve that state, from social conscience. But the title of the chapter, placed closer to Light ("Boredom"), suggests otherwise.

Light will spend more time comparing himself to his later opponents, but he is very like Ryu as well. Both are monsters whose idle, selfish desires will wreak great damage upon the world before the game of the Death Note comes to its explosive conclusion.