Dead Rock Volume 2 Review
The new series from Fairy Tail creator Hiro Mashima continues to build on the groundwork established in its first volume, creating a fantasy manga that should become increasingly enjoyable.
The students of Class F in Dead Rock, the elite school on level 666 of the demon world, are beginning to settle down. Well, as much as you can settle down when you have already wiped out another class and one of the students has an overwhelming desire to kill the principal, who claims to be God.
This volume starts with the first class in practical training – i.e. fighting each other. It begins with a practice with Yakuto, the wannabe deicide with the powers of a black dragon, teamed up with Frey, the fire-using Ifrit. We learn that the reason that Frey came to Dead Rock was because her older sister also came here, but failed to graduate, so she hopes to surpass her. However, things become more disturbing when their teacher, Louzen, takes them into the lesson proper, which involves the entire class fighting his “battle pets” – zombified former students that he can have his wicked way with. Frey recognises one of them as her sister and decides to fight her, but things become even more chaotic when Yakuto fully transforms into the black dragon and starts causing uncontrolled chaos in the school.
Afterwards, Yakuto is punished by having his power restricted so only his right arm can transform. While he is locked in a cell during this punishment, another student, the cat-eared Zelecia the Black Wizard (actually the human form of classmate Chako, who normally takes on the form of a bird), says she knows of a book in the school library that contains God’s weakness.
Much of this volume, and you suspect that of forthcoming volumes, contains information about the backgrounds of the main characters. Aside from learning about Frey, we also learn why Yakuto wants to kill God – namely, God wiped out his entire village when Yakuto’s father refused to let God spend a night with Yakuto’s mother. However, we also once again see references to Mashima’s earlier work. When they are practicing fighting, Frey talks about reading a story in which a fire wizard defeated a black dragon, and when Yakuto does full transform into a black dragon, the dragon in question is Acnologia (Fairy Tail).
Regarding production, all appears to be fine concerning Erin Subramanian’s translation, Cayley Last’s editing, James Dashiell and AndWorld Designs lettering, and the cover design from Yusuke Ohno and Abigail Blackman. If there is the problem, it is a lack of anything extra. All you get in the manga is just the manga, the contents page, and the credits. There are no colour pages, no translation notes, not even adverts of other manga which you expect Kodansha to happily plug. The very last page of the book is just the last page of manga – not even the traditional info about how to read the manga if you are a newbie. On the plus side, that last page does introduce us to a brand new character that we will no doubt be learning more about in Volume 3.
Dead Rock continues to be enjoyable, and will hopefully keep up the good work so far.
Our review copy from Kodansha was supplied by Diamond Book Distributors UK.
