Manga makes light of the macabre

Author Tsugumi Ohba and artist Takeshi Obata join forces in Death Note, in which a klutzy Shinigami demon drops his "death notebook" in the human world and has to go fetch it, causing unimaginable chaos. Helping restore the balance (well, eventually) is a bored 17-year-old boy called Light, who picks up the lost notebook and finds himself permanently bound to the demon. It's a highly entertaining, teenage take on the desire to control—or at least understand—life and death.