Platinum End Volume 1 begins when the orphaned Mirai steps off of a roof to find happiness in death, and the angel Nasse selects him as her candidate for Godhood. Not only does Nasse stop Mirai’s descent, she invests him with a ring that imbues super-speed flight and arrows that make their targets fall in love with him for 33 days. Mirai’s suicidal depression lends him a sobering sagacity as he asks the angel many good questions, starting with “how will these powers make me happy?”

Mirai’s line of questioning ends up revealing more about Nasse than himself, as he and the reader realize that she is a very Old Testament angel, suggesting that he use his new powers self-aggrandizingly, for “bread or money,” love, and revenge. She reveals to him that his parents and little brother, Light (just one of many call outs to Death Note fans), were killed by his aunt and uncle. Mirai is incredulous, so Nasse tells him to use his arrows to get the truth for himself.

Cut to Mirai’s aunt and uncle’s apartment, where he shoots a divine arrow into his aunt, who then lasciviously climbs on top of her incredulous nephew. Nasse, seen only by Mirai, tells him that his aunt will do anything he says. When he shoves his aunt back, and asks her, point blank, “Did you and uncle…kill my family?”, she confesses that she conspired with his uncle to kill them so that an estate inheritance would be undisputed, and when Mirai did not die in the accident, they became his legal guardians to get the insurance payout. Mirai’s uncle, overhearing this confession, begins to strangle her, and Mirai, who was driven to the point of suicide earlier that day by their ongoing abusive treatment of him, can only look away, and mutter that “You’re the ones who ought to die…not me…”

Mirai’s aunt, still under the effect of the divine arrow, breaks away from his uncle, and, her eyes brimming with tears, she seizes a butcher knife and stabs herself in the neck. Lest the reader think that this is penitence on her part, Nasse tells Mirai that her change of heart was wholly due to the effect of the arrow: “She did something so awful that she needed to die to apologize for it. That’s how deeply she fell in love with you.” And lest the reader think her final destination is going to pay her back as well, it is revealed in the next few pages that the purpose of human life is to be happy (Nasse: “Every human being can be happy! No matter what your past is! I guarantee it!”), and that Nasse is here to make Mirai happy, but it is also revealed that Mirai’s aunt had an angel as well as that angel carries away the soul of his expired aunt. Which leaves the reader wondering: was this angel as eagerly whispering to Mirai’s aunt that she should kill Mirai’s family in order to have happiness for herself in life? Nasse is this bloodthirsty, so it would be expected that the other angels are just as likely to be.

In the next segment, we see a God and angelic court that are ridden with ennui. God is exhausted of doing his best to improve humanity, and seeks to abdicate his throne, leaving it to a human chosen from the selections of these 13 angels; the angels are exhausted of ferrying the dead and see this competition as a chance to eternal easy street, as for the angel whose human becomes God “Your angelic duty is finished, and you may live beside that God in peace.” God’s requirements for a divine candidate are revealed later: “…only human beings who had lost their hope to live could be chosen. In other words, to be a candidate, you must be disillusioned, or want to change the world in some way.” So far from looking for life-affirming people with a positive outlook on the world, we learn that Mirai’s suicidal thoughts may have been the strongest asset for Nasse’s selection of him. So the thirteen candidates aren’t the most moral or the most saintly, but the ones with the purest death wish or those with the highest propensity towards world-changing wrath. Perhaps Ohba and Obata put Mirai on the more suicidal end of this spectrum of existential hopelessness because they already dealt with a world-changer in Death Note.

If Platinum End was only a kind of divine reality show in which the most morally worthy contestant would become God, Mirai would have a leg up, as one of the contestants immediately uses his arrows to acquire a harem, and another, deciding cutthroat competition is the best way to ensure their own election to Godhood, becomes a serial killer on the hunt for those with the angels’ gifts. However, we’ve seen that the angels in the Platinum End universe have an inhuman conception of right and wrong, if any, and neither of these candidates get voted out of the game by its divine spectators before the serial killer executes the harem keeper. The latter’s angel may be glad to be done with the miscreant quickly, but otherwise it becomes clear that this is going to be an elimination game, so we understand Mirai’s decision to keep his head down for most of it.

Mirai instructs Nasse to stay in the sky, as candidates can see angels, and Nasse’s presence will put a target on his back. Then he goes to his first day at high school, where fearing only how the next three years of his life are going to go, he is startled to see an unknown angel over the school grounds, indicating the presence of another candidate. Mirai is taken aback just as much by learning the identity of the candidate than he is by what they do, and volume one ends on that cliffhanger.

Platinum End Volume 1 was an extremely good introduction to a cohesive fantasy universe that comes across less as serial fiction and more as a graphic novel. In addition to making commentary on common theological and philosophical conceptions of morality, there is also a sidebar on superhero fiction, as the aforementioned serial killer takes on the mantle of a fictional superhero, Metropoliman. This also invites readers to see this from the metafictional angle, as an antagonist has just conflated fiction and reality and opened a discourse on both.

Readers may most enjoy trying their hand at solving the riddle of Nasse, who, like Jiminy Cricket, purports to be a moral guide, but instead reveals herself to be an amoral enabler of Mirai’s desires, and she doesn’t care if those desires are base or noble. On the other hand, Nasse is the soul of the first volume, as like Chloe Sullivan in Smallville, she’s wonderfully upbeat and excels at exposition. Additionally, Takeshi Obata’s renderings of her nakedness, which could have been distracting at another artist’s hand, come across less as salacious than unearthly, and his his thoughtful page layouts and panel composition underscore the action so that Nasse’s copious exposition doesn’t come off as too didactic.

Fans of Death Note may find some similarities between Platinum End and Ohba and Obata’s previous fantasy, the most telling of which is that the protagonists of both are given otherworldly weaponry to work their will upon an impure world: Light gets the Shingami notebook, and Mirai gets angelic arrows. However, the heroes seem to be at opposite ends of the existential spectrum, with Light eagerly writing dozens of names in the Death Note nearly as soon as he gets it, and Mirai struggling to accept his role in the death of his aunt, a despicable person that caused him immense personal grief. Light, an overachieving A student, assumes that his judgment is good, while Mirai questions everything.

In the universe of Platinum End it seems a given that moral decision-making is problematic, as Mirai makes a point of examining these questions from every angle, and this leaves the authors more free to examine moral causality, that is, the chain of effect that stems from one action, bad or good. While Death Note translators allowed Akira to be translated as Light, the translator of Platinum End kept Mirai in the Japanese, and did not translate it, as calling the protagonist Future would have seemed very heavy-handed, but it is certainly noteworthy to remember what Mirai’s name means when we’re considering the themes of these respective books. Light kills the darkness without questioning, but to see the future, one must consider. What is a good man? Can a good man exist in this causal web of consequences and coincidences? Will Mirai be corrupted by Nasse’s gifts like Akira was corrupted by the Death Note?

Platinum End Volume 1 is highly recommended. The print edition was released on October 4th, 2016, and it is currently available through this link.

Review copy sent by VIZ Media.

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