Review by Frank Plowright

Deadman Wonderland features the bonkers idea of a maximum security jail that’s also a form of theme park to which public tours are available, while additionally the venue for a reality TV show. It’s the temporary new home of fourteen year old Ganta Igarashi, convicted of murdering his entire school class. Readers are shown that’s unlikely to have been what happened, with the murders actually committed by a figure in red armour, dripping blood. They implant something in Ganta, but it doesn’t show up on x-rays. Ganta is transported to Deadman Wonderland awaiting execution.

It would seem Ganta is easy meat surrounded by murderous adults, but he has an unexpected defence, and an ally in mysterious fellow inmate Shiro who seems to have known him as a child.

What may seem an excessively whimsical idea is exploited to the full. There’s no separation of credits, but online sources indicate Jinsei Kataoka being the writer, and she sets up grim situations intended to have readers question how they would act under the circumstances. Ganta is way out of his depth, and basically a good kid, so will he choose the easy option of conforming, or will he stand out? An additional problem is that inmates wear collars injecting them with poison, but the only way the poison can be nullified is via eating what’s known as candy every three days. Candy can be bought at a premium price, or earned via participation in televised games that prove fatal for some. It’s desperate people entering a lottery where the odds are stacked against them and the idea’s not that far removed from massive TV success Squid Game, which came over a decade later, by the way.

Kataoka’s imaginative death scenarios are gruesomely illustrated by Kazuma Kondou, but not in a lingering fashion, although still at a level for American publishers Viz to label the series as only suitable for older teens. Kondou draws a suitably vulnerable Ganta and a gloriously eccentric Shiro, and the longer the book goes on, the more Deadpool comes to mind as her personality template. Kondou’s primary thug is imposing, and the prison staff belie their sinister personalities, looking either positively glamorous or surprisingly normal. The most evil personality is an anonymous looking administrator.

Before the end, Kataoka reveals a threat to readers, but not Ganta. There’s a lot more going on in Deadman Wonderland than first assumed, but going forward the success is going to be contingent on Kataoka being able to conceive equally dangerous and compelling scenarios. We’ll see in Deadman Wonderland 2.

The series was first available in English via editions from Tokypop, but they only completed translations of the first five volumes.