Following Chapter 1’s tragic revelation, Shirai hits the brakes on exposition and, as a good suspense-thriller should, lets the characters’ detective work set the stage. With children’s lives at stake, it’s all too easy to get caught up in the plight of The Promised Neverland‘s doe-eyed heroes. Teaming up with the loner Ray, they realize without any adults to rely on and death awaiting their stay, there is only one option: escape. But on the night six-year-old Conny makes an early farewell, Emma and Norman make a horrifying discovery: Grace Field is not an orphanage paradise, but a farm raising human children for consumption by demons, and their provider is none other than Mom. But this neverland doesn’t last forever: before they reach the age of 12, children are assigned new foster homes and leave Grace Field for good.īefore The Promised Neverland‘s beginning, such departures were the envy of every Grace Field orphan. It may be a gated orphanage, yet that doesn’t stop the children from dreaming of the outside world: the books filling the library tell of animals, of trains and trucks, and of clothes differing from their dull white uniforms. Grace Field is a children’s paradise, filled with food, warm beds and laughter filling its fields and halls.
Debuting last year by writer Kaiu Shirai and artist Posuka Demizu, The Promised Neverland is a thriller twice as dark and infinitely more heart-wrenching, owing to Shirai’s masterful storytelling and Demizu’s bewitching art.Įmma, Ray and Norman are three 11-year-old geniuses living at the Grace Field House Orphanage, raised under the care of a woman they know only as Mom. As anyone reading VIZ Media’s digital localization of said anthology knows, however, Death Note may finally have met its match in The Promised Neverland, and what a coincidence - it also just happens to be penned by an artist/writer duo. It was unlike anything Japanese manga anthology Weekly Shonen Jump had published before, what with its questions of morality (“is it okay to kill criminals?”) captivating its brooding teen audience and inspiring impassioned debates every which way on the Internet. Like, really.Ī decade ago, Death Note captured the manga-reading world with its grim visuals and cat-vs-mouse narrative, featuring gods of death and killer notebooks used to purge the world of criminals. A quick summary for such readers: it’s really, really good.
Those who want to jump into The Promised Neverland completely unaware may want to skip this review. Notice: While we don’t dive into specific developments following the 1st chapter, given how it drives the plot, we summarize the shocking events of the manga’s beginning in full. Shonen Jump’s thriller finally hits stores.