Dead Rock Volume 1 Review
Any series created by Hiro Mashima (Fairy Tail and Edens Zero) is clearly going to get a good fan base right from the off. There will be plenty of people wanting to see what his newest work is like. If you were to sum up Dead Rock in three words, they would probably be: “School is Hell”.
“Dead Rock” is the name of an elite school located in level 666 of the demon world, run by the evil God himself. The series starts with the school’s entrance exam, in which 1,000 potential students with differing demonic roots attempt to escape a pit of giant ant lions. Ultimately, only seven manage to survive, who end up forming Class F of Dead Rock. The central protagonist is Yakuto, who has a root of an extinct black dragon which he can transform into. Upon the first day in class, he declares his intention is to kill God, whom he believes to be a fake.
Yakuto says that his mission will result in his six classmates getting involved. whether they like it or not. These six are Frey the Ifrit, a fire-user with a love of battling; Raizen the Orochi, who wields a sword he calls “Princess” which he constantly takes delicate care of; Hien the Fenrir, who uses an ice-magic katana; Mikoto the Lich, a necromancer who brings back the dead as her own zombie puppets; Hani the Thor, a haniwa clay being who can change his size and fights with a lightning-powered hammer; and Chako the Yatagarasu, the most mysterious of the group who appears as a bird.
Those who have read Mashima’s previous works know that he has a habit of back-referencing his previous creations. Indeed, this can be seen right on the book’s cover, designed by Yusuke Ohno and Abigail Blackman, which depicts Yakuto as he uses his dragon magic. In it, you can see the head of the black dragon, which appears to be based on the design of Fairy Tail’s Acnologia. Other references to his earlier work appear in the story too, with one of the students taking the entrance exam matching the appearance of the celestial beast Taurus, as used by Lucy. Then you have similar character abilities, with Frey being a fire-user like Natsu and Hien an ice-user like Gray, but unlike their Fairy Tail counterparts there is no clear hatred between the two.
However, this series obviously has a much darker tone than his previous work, simply because of the hellish setting. In the opening chapter multiple characters are killed, mostly in the entrance exam, but even on the first day in class, Yakuto kills a teacher. The other classmates also get into fights, with Raizen himself getting killed, but revived as a zombie by Mikoto. Regardless, as this opening manga is only three chapters long, it hasn’t really got into its stride yet in terms of fleshing out the other main characters and their motivations.
As for the production, there appear to be no issues with the editing from Cayley Last or the translation from Erin Subramanian, especially as the translation notes make it clear that some things can be lost when translating between English and Japanese, and Subramanian tries to clarify certain points. For example, when God first appears in a double-page spread at the beginning of the book, he says: “…in the name of God…”, but he is actually referring to himself in the first person, as in “…in my (God’s) name…”
The lettering from James Dashiell and AndWorld Design is generally fine, although in that same double-page spread, they add a tiny note translating a tattoo on God’s chest, which reads “God”, and by “tiny note”, I mean they use what has to be the smallest type-face they had access to. I guess it helps, but obviously such small text is hard to read for some people, and they could have just included this information in the translation notes anyway rather than on the drawing itself.
Generally, this volume is a decent enough opening, and I am intrigued to see how things actually progress as we get deeper into the story itself.
Read the first chapter of Dead Rock free on the publisher’s website here.
Our review copy from Kodansha was supplied by Diamond Book Distributors UK.
