Deadman Wonderland

Special thanks to my friend Mala for selecting the manga for this review! I had originally heard of Deadman Wonderland in my freshman year of highschool, though I had tried watching the anime I was informed the manga was much better so just read that so then I just... forgot about it until now -w-)ll Whoops. But enough reminiscing, you're here for the manga. Deadman Wonderland by Kataoka Jinsei is an action series about Ganta Igarashi, a middleschooler who after a mysterious masked person kills his entire class except him, finds himself falsely convicted for the massacre. This lands him a spot in the titular Deadman Wonderland, a privately run prison in the remnants of Tokyo styled as an amusement park that uses prisoners from all around the country for its bloody attractions. I will be upfront and say my review is not super comprehensive as I read up to chapter 26 and was really not feeling it so I skipped to the last few chapters, this manga was a pretty big let down.

It's a shame because I was interested by the initial concept, the prison death games seem thrilling and the need for points and candy to keep their prisoner collars from killing them a great source of danger as well, but we really don't see much of the death games after the first one, and even the points and collar stops coming up as much which makes the setting seem like a waste. I think part of what made this manga really meh for me was that it is largely action driven, leaving the characters to just react to things instead of any of them properly developing outside a few paltry flashbacks during fights which really didn't add enough to make the characters truly compelling. There's of course nothing wrong with a more action driven story, but in one like this were they talk a lot about justice and the various past crimes that lead our characters to this point it just seems like an odd choice to not properly go into that. This is a smaller aspect as the character is not super present but I really did not like the character Itadaki whose whole personality was being fat and obsessed with food to the point of splitting their mouth open, fat characters who exist just to be gross and fat while not uncommon are still a pet peeve. Another thing I did not care for is how eye-rollingly edgy the writing could be sometimes.