Manga Review: Defense Devil

Title: Defense Devil
Author: Youn In-an, Yang Kyung Il
Release: Weekly
Status: Ongoing
Genre: Shonen, Supernatural
Art: S
Originality: S
Story: A
Characters: A
Humor: B
Action: S

Impression: This is quite an interesting manga. It has a very new concept I’ve never run into before and it’s quite a hopeful story. It’s about a banished demon prince who has decided to work as defense attorney for human beings that died under suspicious circumstances to keep them out of Hell and redo their final moments. The first thing you’ll notice about the manga is its art style which is somewhat reminiscent of Death Note’s gothic style. It is incredibly detailed for a weekly shonen series and very heavy on the inking. I’m curious as to whether or not the authors use assistants to do the artwork or not as it would take an excessive amount of effort to keep it up alone or incredibly good assistants. It’s incredible how static the style can be at times and how it can be used to express spectacularly elaborate attacks done by the characters. It even works for fanservice as the women drawn to be attractive using this style. As for the writing, I can’t say it’s excellent and it feels like the heavy art style somehow also increases the weight of the story and the pacing between scenes can be quite slow at times. However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t good. This story really likes to play around with the nature of humans and the lead can be described as a completely selfless hero as hard as that might be to believe. Even I can’t help but feel admiration towards Kucabara’s desire to help people. The dialogue could use a bit of sprucing up but it has improved since the first few chapters of the series and authors have seem to now understand when humor should be left out of scenes. This kind of story would have been perfect for a light novel so I imagine this will get picked up for novelization and an anime adaptation sooner than one might think.