Death Note

Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's manga is a battle of wits dressed as a supernatural thriller: a brilliant student finds a notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it, and the genius detective hunting him is just as ruthless. The twelve-volume run is the spine of everything here, and it is one of the few manga whose moral argument (does Light Yagami become a god or a monster?) genuinely sustains the page count.

The adaptations splinter in fascinating ways. The 2006 anime is the canonical screen version, while the live-action Japanese films rewrite the ending and spin L into his own movie. Later Japanese television and a 2016 sequel keep stretching the premise, and a 2017 American remake relocates it with mixed results. Few thrillers have generated this many competing interpretations of the same notebook.

The Death Note franchise spans 3 series, 13 books, 7 films in the CrossBinge catalog.