Welcome to Manga Cum Loudly Presents: Death Note, Vol. 2, Chapter 8: “Woman”! Yes, that’s right, in Manga World the new volumes don’t reset the chapter numbers. This is a brand new batch of chapters to slog through, my friends. In the previous installment, which is also the conclusion of the previous volume, Raito tricks the American FBI agent, who has been following him around for the last week, into showing him his FBI identification card. He has the very American name of “Raye Penber”. This all occurs during a bus hijacking, a situation that Raito completely orchestrated with the Death Note. In summary, Raito avoids further suspicion by looking like a normal kid on his way to a normal amusement park for a normal date, and throws Penber off the trail further by making the hijacker able to see Ryuuku and losing his mind before stumbling out of the bus and getting hit by a car.

MANGA!

So, with the FBI agent’s full name in his hot little hand, Raito will likely kill this guy even though this guy no longer suspects Raito anyway. Time to see how this breaks bad even further.

Death Note, Vol. 2, Ch. 8
Written by: Tsugumi Ohba
Illustrated by: Takeshi Obata
“Woman”

We pick up exactly where we last left off, not even missing a beat, making the fact that this is a new volume completely arbitrary and needless. The victims of the bizarre bus hostage situation disembark. RAYE PENBER leaves directly ahead of Raito.

Nothing like a crisis to cause a couple of knuckleheads to form a tight bond! Penber gets the kid’s attention before he fully leaves the bus. “Hey, to tell you the truth, the reason I’m in Japan is I’m on a secret mission…”

These English translations leave a lot to be desired, such as reasonable pacing and realistic attitudes toward shit like FBI agents telling kids that they’re on secret missions.

Raito understands, and he promises not to tell anyone, especially his father, who is on a secret mission himself, by the way. Really clandestine stuff. Abu Ghraib prison level scandals and other similar monkeyshines.

Anyway, son, Penber has to boogie before the fuzz arrives. Take it sleeaazy. He walks away while Raito glares at him.

“Just as I calculated,” Raito thinks in the eerie, psychopathic font that always shows up when he starts thinking his eerie, psychopathic thoughts, “I don’t want the police to know I had an encounter with an FBI agent. If Dad found out, L would know too.”

That leaves one option! Gotta murder the sumbitch! Listen, it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. Better him than me, Raito always says. Penber doesn’t suspect him one bit anymore! Perfect time to write in the ol’ Death Note. Something like “Raye Penber sits on a garden gnome and tears his anus”, which would be fun.

That’s a smooth icebreaker, kiddo. You’ll be in her pants in no time.

Don’t forget that Raito is supposed to be on a date! Now that the horribly traumatic experience is over, maybe a day at the park isn’t such a great ideas anym–

“Don’t you dare!” she yells at his bewildered expression, “We’re almost at Space Land, let’s just go!”

Ugh, women. Raito has figured everything out so far, has always stayed two steps ahead, but this girl? Forget it. Emotional and irrational! Am I right, fellas?!?!?

Ryuuku chuckles at Raito’s misfortune. Have fun at Space Land, loser.

Meanwhile, the focus of the story is now on Raye Penber, the unfortunately-named Japanese-American FBI agent. He returns, simply downtrodden, back to his hotel room where a lady is waiting for him! A wife? A girlfriend? An escort? All three and then some?? “Did something happen at work today? You sound tired,” she says with a sultry side-eye.

Now Penber says “I was caught in a random busjacking”, but my mind instantly saw “I was caught jacking on the bus”, so that tells you exactly how my brain operates. I’m a 35-year-old engineer with children. How miserable is that? Count your own blessings once in a while.

First this busjacker was a bankjacker! Just two days ago he robbed a Bank of America! …Japan Branch. “Japan’s become a dangerous country,” Penber says with a sigh. His wife/girlfriend/prostitute looks worried. Raye was on a bus during a bus jacking? That’s too goddamned dangerous. He should be working from home marketing UNIQLO clothing stores in Chicago and playing Dance Dance Revolution during his lunch breaks.

“Is he dead?” she asks.
“Yeah, probably. I decided it wasn’t a good idea to get involved, so I didn’t stick around to see what happened afterwards…” he responds trailing off. Didn’t stick around to see what happened afterwards?? The dude got hit by a car WHILE YOU WERE STILL ON THE BUS. YOU WERE WATCHING THROUGH THE WINDOW. *knocks on Penber’s head with skull-breaking force* HELLOOO IN THERE???

First a lunatic jacks a bus full of people and then someone dies?? Something’s fishy here!

Awfully suspicious, though, don’t you think? She needles him a little bit about this. “I mean, you were following someone when you got on the bus, right? And now that criminal is likely dead…”

Rub a couple of brain cells together, Penber! Get those think-juices gushing!

“Look,” he begins with a visage of misogynistic scorn, “it’s true you were an outstanding FBI agent, but now you’re just my fiancée. You’re not an agent anymore.”

Fucking wow.

She backs off because women are submissive in manga without exception. “It’s ok, don’t worry about it,” he says sweetly, “Once we start a family you’ll be so busy that you won’t even remember that you were once an agent, and there won’t be any time for your old habits.”

Fucking WOW. Holy shit, dude. Jump off a bridge. Raito has your name. You’re donezo.

Meanwhile, back at Casa de Raito, his giant Japanese Joker friend leers over his shoulder while he flips through his sacred notebook of pain and skulls. When asked if Raito intends to write Penber’s name in the book, he responds with a vague “Nope. I’ll write his name… yeah, next week.”

Since it would be suspicious if he wrote his name right here, right now. The guy can still be useful! He can… uh… tell me who else is in town from the FBI! Yeah. I’ll just invite him over for a game of Chutes and Ladders and he can tell me all of his secrets! We’re buddies now, you know.

Ryuuku’s response to this is a big “?”, which happens a lot. Too much. This death god sure isn’t on the ball that often.

“But for now it’s time for another prisoner to keep L company,” he smiles, likely devolving this series into a predictable episodic cycle of killing-a-guy and making-L-spin-his-wheels for dozens of chapters to come!

Immediately, he sends L on another goose chase, as promised. Watari informs L that there’s been another victim, and this one also wrote a suicide note just like that other guy from the thing! Watari sends him the note. It says a lot of stuff; that part doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the first letter of every line spells out the word “reapers”.

L discovers this in a matter of nanoseconds. “Are you trying to tell me that reapers exist, Kira?” L muses out loud. He instructs Watari to keep every police eyeball on the prisons because more prisoners might write notes, I guess. Maybe notes where the first letter of every line spells out “CORN POPS”.

Where WTF now means “What the FBI?”

Over at the Headquarters of Bumbling Through Figuring Out Why People Are Dying, Mr. Raito’s Dad has to figure out why FBI agents are dying now. Eight FBI agents in the last week have succumbed to MYOCARDIAL INFARCTIONS! Also known as *thumbs through Garfield Goes Hog Wild: His 70th Book* heart attacks! And there is evidence that these agents were also monitoring the Japanese police. You know, making sure they weren’t kneeling on any necks or anything.

Watari eavesdrops on this dramatic conversation and telephones FBI CENTRAL hurf hurf hurf! They tell L that they are unable to get in contact with every single FBI agent prowling around the Tokyo region. Kira snuffed them all out!

Shit! Shit shit shit! Oh god! The stakes are so high! Almost like there’s some sort of note that causes death!

“Did any of the agents know each other’s faces?” L asks the FBI boss man chief guy, and FBI boss man chief guy has an answer to this. “…not until yesterday…”

Aha! A breakthrough in the case! Agents who didn’t know what other agents looked like until yesterday had, in fact, learned about what other agents looked like yesterday. Riveting.

The talking orb, with respect to a country with 125 million people, wants a full list of “all the friendlies”. And we’re supposed to interpret this as…not sexual??

L determines that Kira got in touch with “that agent” and got the information he needed. What a huge SNAFU! Someone needs to get hella fired for such a blunder. Get me assistant director WALTER SKINNER so I can serve him his own ass in a chafing dish.

But the crazy part is that the FBI chief man boss guy head honcho received, from every single agent, a request for a full list of agents. He fulfilled the request and sent the file to the first four, then asked them to pass it along to the rest of them. There’s the SNAFU right there, bro. What a dumb thing to do. Here I am playing FBI armchair quarterback, but that sounds like a dumb thing to do to me. What do I know, though? I’m not a fucking high-ranking FBI official.

FBI boss has the heebie-jeebies. He wants to call off the investigation. No more FBI involvement. This is crazy go-nuts, dude. Some real sick stuff here, and he’s seen a lot. So many pedophilia rings busted. So many private pedophilia islands infiltrated. So many pedophile ice cream trucks ransacked for Rocky Road. It was fine when it was just criminals, but now there’s real people getting dead. Bad juju! See ya.

“Chief, call from Director Yagami of the Japanese police. Line 2,” pipes in his secretary. Christ, that mustached asshole? Fine, send him through, BUT he’s going to tell him that the FBI acted entirely on L’s orders and that any accountability will land directly on him! Heh heh heh. See ya.

L is left speechless. Alone. Cold. Depressed. Suicidal. Hungry. Antsy. Feisty. Surly. Morose. Jaded. Delirious. Lustful. Petulant. Itchy.

You incompetent piece of shit. You soggy dumbass.

Director Yagami feels like he’s been punked! The rest of his yesmen team are like “yeah, me too” and “uh huh what a pickle” and “I KNEW we couldn’t trust that guy, he doesn’t even have a full name, it’s just a letter and it’s not even in the Japanese alphabet”.

Well dags, if Kira moved on from killing criminals to killing feds, who knows who’s next? Circus clowns? Hispanic children? Zac Efron?

Oh well, let’s sleep on it! Zzzzzzz. The next morning already! Yawn! What a beautiful day.

Watari annoys L with yet another note from yet another victim. It’s getting pretty old. We’re running out of people on the planet to kill, by my count.

“Kira,” L narrates to himself while clenching a fist in a manner of grim determination, “Your actions are big this time. Chances are you met one of those twelve agents. And you’ve surely left clues!”

Raito celebrates another victory! Time for cake.

I don’t know about you, but I’m moist with anticipation here.

Also, this happened. Here’s the twist we all saw coming four chapters ago:

Anger! Leeway! Tears! Swirling Emotions! Unfriendly Thoughts! Unhappy Bowels!

Final Thoughts

There are sure a lot of pages and chapters dedicated to doing the same thing over and over again! Someone should put Raito’s hand in a glass of warm water so he can pee his bed.