Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo has just finished over in the Windy City.  It ran from March 18th-20th and Techaeris's Kyle Funk was there to catch what Viz Media had in store for fans of Death Note.

Turns out there's not much that we didn't already know or could guess.

In his piece VizMedia At C2E2 2016 #C2E22016, Funk confirmed that no add on to the Death Note manga is planned now or in the future.  That should answer the regular search terms leading people to this site, asking 'when will there be a new Death Note manga?' or 'is there a sequel to Death Note?'  Nope.  Sorry.

Mostly it seemed that Viz were in Chicago bigging up the Blu-Ray Death Note Omega Edition, which was recently released.  They showed a trailer demonstrating the difference in quality between the old bog standard anime and Blu-Ray.  Which is also on their YouTube Channel, so you may see it too, alongside an extended marketing clip unboxing the Death Note Blu-Ray Omega Edition, also by Viz Media.

While we're all familiar with the movie L Change the World - even those who wish they weren't - even long-standing Death Note fans might have missed the fact that Matsuda got his own short film in relation to it.  As these stills from the ten minute movie attest:

Broadcast on Japanese television, initially on February 8th 2008, Spin-Off Matsuda was basically made up of scenes deleted from the movie itself.  It followed the fortunes of Touta Matsuda in a story which ran concurrently with those seen with L, Maki and Near.

It starred Sōta Aoyama as Matsuda, reprising his role from the other live-action movies in the trilogy (soon to be quartet).

As with the main movie L Change the World, Kiyomi Fujii wrote the screenplay. The spin-off covers Matsuda's issues with filing a final Kira case report, and a poignant meeting with L a fortnight before the latter's known and inevitable death.

We're slowly but surely creating community Pinterest boards for all Death Note characters and Touta Matsuda is no exception.  There's a burgeoning community over there awaiting your Matsuda pins across the board.  Here is the story so far:

No real rules about what you can and can't post over there.  As long as it's on topic and colludes with all mores on common decency and sense, then we're good.  It might be a nice way to big up your articles, art, photographs, cosplay, fan-fiction and whatever else Mr Matsuda inspires in you as muse.

Come and join us on Matsuda's Death Note Pinterest board.  Invite your friends.  In response, we'll do our best to get all invitations approved in a timely fashion for Month of Matsuda on Death Note News.

They have played heroes and fools; given voice to the one and only Touta Matsuda in anime dubs, TV shows and movies across the globe.  We have collected them here in a roll call of ALL the Death Note Matsuda actors internationally.

Who for you brought to life one of the Japanese NPA's finest Kira task force officers? Who for you speaks the voice, holds the personality and/or wears the face of Touta Matsuda from Death Note?  Let's see, shall we?

As Teru Mikami peeps into the Yellow Box Warehouse and glimpses each person with his shinigami eyes, the true name and lifespan of Matsuda is revealed.  He is Matsuda Touta, whose life dates are 5 4 8 1 9 2.  However those are within the Death God calendar to which mere mortals are not privy.  Nor is there any overt hidden meaning here from the creators.  By now, Tsugumi Ohba has just indicated that numbers should be present and Takeshi Obata has inserted those which seemed aesthetically pleasing.

Touta Matsuda is billed as a fashionable young man; a typical mainstream individual excited by the latest trends in popular culture, however they manifest. This has led him to being viewed as shallow or fickle by those around him.  A man so caught up in the razzmatazz of events like the choosing of Kira's television spokesperson, that he doesn't seem to even register the distaste nor danger inherent in such a spectacle.

Tsugumi Ohba, in How to Read, states that Touta has an innocent heart (hence his loyalty and compassion in believing that Light is not Kira) and an inferiority complex. The latter is due to his constant exposure to quite brilliant people.

His excitable, hasty actions label him as somewhat of a trouble-maker within the Japanese Kira task-force.  However, these same traits may manifest as daring, courage and quick-thinking.  Matsuda is able to extract himself and others from dangerous scenarios by exploiting how others view him and through applying some of that daring speed of mind.

Also in How to Read, Matsuda's ability chart scores highly for unpredictability, with lesser scores - but still a mention - for creativity, intelligence, initiative, social skills and emotional strength.

What will we accept?  Anything really, as long as it's suitable for all ages and able to be posted in an article here.  Even if that's just a heads up on where it's lodged elsewhere.

There's more about that on the Death Note Month of... homepage, and the various ways in which content might be added is on the submissions page.

Of particular interest are essays, images, opinion pieces, whatever, which tell us something we may not have realised about Death Note's Matsuda.  A nuance in his name; a tell in the way he acts, dresses, speaks; a facet in his plot-line or history, which you'll only know if you have some obscure insight; or a detail of his characterisation which skips the masses by.

Because most people seeing Matsuda's event coming up were more than a little disdaining - what do you want a Month of a Matsuda for?  He's nondescript.  He doesn't do anything!

No, only shoot Kira and denounce Near.  So, what have you got to tell them they're wrong?  Or do you agree?  Write that instead.

As usual, we'd love to hear from Death Note fan artists, writers and cosplayers.  You each have your own page, with a questionnaire apiece, regardless of whether you do or don't cosplay Touta.  Or simply send us a photograph, gallery link or email of your Matsuda work, if you want to participate, but not bother with the sharing of secrets.

We'll post them roughly as they come in.  The last day for items to appear is March 31st 2016.

See how organised we are this month?   All the lessons learned, even if we are a bit late.

Real life is happening in abundance.  In a good way for a change this weekend, but it means that no editor will be here to post anything until Monday.  Apologies for any inconvenience caused.   I'll look forward to perusing all that you've done and sent in then.

Also there is a slight backlog in Matti responding to emails etc, because of said real life inconsiderately intruding.  Thank you for your patience and all that.  No-one will have been forgotten, though again it may be early next week before anyone answers. 

But you'll be busy anyway, writing your Matsuda stuff.

The Fool is possibly the most interesting card of the Major Arcana (aka Trump cards). It's certainly unique - integral to all tarot based story-telling to follow, whilst simultaneously standing alone.

For a start, it is the only card to bear a Hindu-Arabic number - zero - if it carries one at all. The rest of the Trump cards are counted in Roman Numerals: I, II, III, IV and so forth. This remains true regardless of where it sits in the tarot deck - for The Fool has been known to wander from the prequel to the end of the Major Arcana (no. 22); or else in between.  Sometimes even drifting over into the minor arcana, where it sits outside any of the suits too.

The Fool is not numbered in Roman numerals with the other Major Arcana, because it doesn't really matter where it's positioned.  It's omnipresent; fitting in everywhere, and nowhere.

Even while seen as something apart, The Fool tends to play a part in proceedings, and can take a myriad of forms. This includes the environments, situations or states of mind that are nominally governed by any other card in the Tarot deck, but is especially true where the Major Arcana are concerned.

Many of which are found with Death Note's narrative.  But first...

Words like 'arcana' and 'tarot' have been thrown around without me once delving into what they mean.  Thus you have no context for the folly to follow.  Let me fill in the blanks with explanation to define this world for you.

'Arcana' means 'secrets' or 'mysteries'.  It's plural.  One secret, one mystery, would be arcanum.  The Major Arcana are the big ones, known only to a select few.  The Minor Arcana is where the humdrum of ordinary things are hidden; far more accessible by the masses in society.  The latter make up the suits in common playing cards, which anyone can use.

This is where you'll find the minutiae of minor mysteries and everyday miracles - birth, death, love, hate, money, loss, friendship, family, long-time sickness, health, happiness, fear and all those other small things that may be found on any urban community sprawl.  They  make up reality, but they don't make it.

The former aren't in your average poker pack.  You can't use them to deal a hand in Blackjack or Snap.  They aren't a game for just anyone to play. 
That concealed in the Major Arcana is the domain of privilege - which means 'private law' - the preserve of rulers and the elite.  Their secrets and mysteries describe the process by which reality is formed; the building blocks for the creation and definition of a new world order.

For example, the commoners may have all the babies they like, and learn the arcana of childbirth. But it is their priests, law-makers, and leaders of the moral majority who tell them whether having that baby was alright.  Stepping out of line can mean social ostracisation, imprisonment, that infant taken from you or anything else which asserts control by those who have dominion over this particular realty; who own the domain or real estate.

Who shape this realm's reality. 

'Tarot' means 'colour' or 'illustration'.  Collectively, these cards paint a picture of the human world in which we live, its society, hierarchy and all the rest. While the minor arcana tells the story, the context is made from the major.  That's the arcana to illuminate the blocking blocks; point out the strings to pull; and fill in the fine detail with colour.  Those privy to the ways of the Major Arcana get to become Gods of the New World - or at least try.

Which is pretty much the story at the heart of Death Note too.

However, there is one to transcend arcana - one of the Trump cards, but also present in an ordinary deck of playing cards.  The wild card going wherever it will; difficult to pin down, yet with the potential to bring about the downfall of emperors and saints.  The hidden force behind it all.  The alpha and omega of any given tale - jester to some; joker to others; and in tarot, The Fool.

The most obvious Royal Road undertaken in Death Note is that by Light Yagami.  When he first picked up the fallen notebook of death, he had no idea what it was nor what it might mean.  He was curious enough to find out. 

His ignorance was blunted with a perusal of the rules written inside.  After about three seconds worth of dismissing it all as a foolish prank, he decided to be that Fool.  Testing out the pages to see if someone really would die.  I mean, what's the worst that might happen?  Yep, what it said on the packet, or in this case, fly-sheet.  So Light continued using it, stepping foolhardily into the dark unknown, though he had no idea what it might mean for himself personally.

In fact, his best guess was that the shinigami would come for his soul, like the Death Note's usage was some Faustian pact.  Not at all literally - though it might as well be - Light was willing to sign a contract with the Devil, in order to journey yet further into the reality shaking conventions of this strange new book.

Did it send him insane?  That's another reading of The Fool - the madness inherent in losing all sense of that otherwise universal conviction that all share the same reality.  We don't.  Nurture, nature, the quicks of physicality and all those myriad personal influences, not to mention perspective, mean that none of us receive the same data, nor interpret it simultaneously and in the same way.   Nontheless, pretending that there's one dominion of the real (or royal) shared by all keeps us from straying onto such foolish pathways.

Light Yagami typifies the Fate of those who do.  With no-one to bounce his new reality off, but a semi-divine being who previously had no data to exist, Kira slips ever further into unreality.  Until he can't even see what everyone else judges to be real.  In his arrogance, he over-reaches his own domain and the resultant mistakes lead Mello and Near right to him, lending proof to their case.

Until finally, ranting without sight of any objective reality, Light attempts  a secondary fall - this time from grace, as espoused by his task force, and from secrecy, in letting his veil of truth slip.   As he made his confession - I am Kira! And also God of this New World! - he sparked a seismic shift in the perceptions of most there present.  Confirming not only the reality of the Death Note, shinigami and all, but also his prolonged part its usage.

No wonder they shot him.  Thus precipitating his third and final fall, from existence and being into Mu.

The Fool in the sense of 'an empty-headed Fool' now embodied nothingness.  Back to the beginning again.

The Fool is the thorn in the side of reality; ergo those who own its real estate too. 

As wild card, it has partial immunity to the wiles and ways of the Major Arcana. Standing aside, yet also part of the minor arcana, so unable to be dismissed out of hand.  Despite the fact that the Fool will not, can not, or else alone decides when and where to, view the world as written by its creators of reality.  And that is dangerous insofar as it places a crack in the veneer of the real, which could fracture the picture entirely. Or else may breed revolution or dissent.

It has always been the province of kids and Fools to tell the Emperor that he wears no clothes.

Unwittingly or not, the Fool commands the story.  Acting as its fail-safe, in madness, ridicule, wit or slap-stick, this card can bring about the fall of all pretenders to power.  Worse still, the Fool could simply walk away, consigning the disregarded erstwhile God to nothingness.  Dissolving into the essential arcana that which allowed him/her/it to arise.

And the great cosmic joke seems ever historically to be that the watchful masses follow more gladly those with the power to entertain. They will dismiss any who leave them bored.

Why else do you think US presidential candidates spend $40m and more on their campaigns?  Those spellbound foolish Americans demand their spectacle, just like everybody else, and those seeking to impress them need to pay enough entertainers to ensure that everybody sing their song.

Of course back in the day, no millions were needed to make rulers stand tall before their reality's subjects.  Only a good deal of generous hospitality, or a tame bard or two.

Tarot cards arose in their modern from the medieval period, when Jesters and Joculators (Jokers) represented all that remained of the once proud Bardic System.   A branch of Druidry subsumed under Christianity; the staple of the old, crushed, Celtic courts.  Much of this tradition - tarot and bardic alike - came from France, where the groves of the Bretons and Gauls once dotted the land, and the great Romances bloomed.

An elite then who knew the dangers inherent in bards - who wove better stories then them in songs and recited tales, who could speak on behalf of people and spread dissent - hence doing all to reduce their power.  Edward I, for example, had over 500 Welsh bards killed, when they refused to sign praise-songs to him on their harps.   Others across the old Celtic lands of Europe followed his lead, if not his scale.

Most simply froze them out.  Not giving them a platform to sing at their hearth.  Give or take those who could be trusted to toe the line.  The rest wandered about as minstrels, denounced from throne and pulpit alike, and the foolish congregations by and large turned against them.

Skip forward a century or so, and the drip-drip of reduction in stature has allowed courts to keep 'jesters', who tell 'jokes' that are simply ridiculous instead of pointing ridicule at their sire.  Thus the Fool became silly, idiotic, without the power to sting.  Sort of.  The harp of my country survived - how about yours?

And this, I think, is the final point about the Fool.  He exists everywhere because he is legion.  He's included in the tarot, because he - or the idea of him - is still a threat.  All who tell and hear stories are the Fools, and that power could never be reduced.  All hail the story-tellers.  Bards and Fools all.

They were there at the beginning.   They remain irretrievably linked at the end.  We feel their influence in every nuance of the story, and reference them whenever any other version is told.  They were there every step of the way, yet never once appear in it at all.

Of course, the Fools we talk of here are the story-tellers:  Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata; and those who heard their tale:  you, me and the whole Death Note fandom.  We fell for it big-time and wouldn't let them fail.  Within the confines of this story, we judged them Gods of this manga universe; instigators and arbitrators of canon. In our minds and imaginations at least, their Death Note domain became real; its creators had (re)written reality.

Yet even the author and artist of Death Note, widely acclaimed and heralded as the best in their genre, could fail in the final judgement.  Even there, the fandom retained the potential to walk away as bored Fools lured into watching the spectacle elsewhere.

For evidence, just see the widespread rejection of the belated canon-directed colouring for Matt.  He's got brown eyes and brown hair, Death Note fans were informed, a decade after the fanon colouring had been fixed.  You're wrong, a few louder Fools yelled back at the Mangaka Gods.  But most simply said nothing at all.  Just pretended they hadn't heard a thing, and continued to colour Matt with blue/green eyes and bright red hair.  The shift denoted nothing and faded into nothingness. 

But on balance, the reality Ohba-sensei and Obata-sensei wrought remained.  It was enough to win them The World.

As a part of our Month of Light Yagami, three of his anime voice actors agreed to answer questions from fans. Our thanks are duly owed to Brad Swaile, Sergio Zamora, and Kim Hasper for agreeing to the interviews.

Also to Nia for designing the banner used to announce their participation.

The questions so many of you submitted have been collated. Our undying thanks are owed to Jojo, who translated questions and content into German, and to Lua, Silvia and Madelyn, who translated questions into Spanish for Sergio.

The voice actors have been passed (or are in the progress of receiving) the questions you submitted, and we will post the interviews when we receive their responses.  This may take a short amount of time, as there were quite a few of them - well over 100 for each of the three - and two sets have to be twice translated by our saintly volunteers.

Amaryllis, who submitted a guest post on Light's name and was always on hand to translate various bits of Japanese writing (along with Ethereality, Renchan and Chiroptera).

Maru-Light, who penned a Focus on a Fan feature piece, and also participated in the event with gusto over three separate contributions:  a piece on cosplaying Light; a guest post on the Death Note fan-fiction Redeemer Series; and finally a unique guest post on making Death Note dolls.  Plus she said that we could raid her gallery of Light Yagami cosplay photography, whenever we needed to illustrate a page.  Seems rude not to.  (See below.)

Renchan, who not only wrote a guest post on why Light was called Kira, but also quietly covered many of the actual Death Note news updates for a period in the middle there.

Lua, whose contemplations led to a guest post on the philosophies behind the deification of Light (as a break from writing her Philosophy dissertation); whose research found the Russian Light Yagami voice actor, the identity of whom had eluded three EHC members; and who still found time to step up to the plate as a translator for Sergio Zamora, and a bit for Kim Hasper's profile, and random Spanish, Portuguese, German, French...

Lucas King, a composer and musician who interpreted and played Light's theme on Piano, and sent in a video so we might listen and enjoy.

Light Yagami, who submitted a guest post on cosplaying Light Yagami.  You are Kira, aren't you?

Riconius, who read all so far, became enthused, stayed up all night musing, recording and otherwise creating a guest vlog and submitted it next day.

(Matti ninjas in to thank) Orangepunch, for exploring the astrological cosmos; writing all other thank you notices; getting us caught up with the Miyano Mamoru news; translating much Spanish for Sergio's profile page; helping create the Kira gift store; general admin., coding, contacting, researching and proof-reading; putting up with becoming a Month of Kira widow while I'm editing it, plus - most importantly of all - bringing copious refills in cups of tea; and finally, for compiling the world's most difficult Light Yagami crossword puzzle for Death Note News.  In the words of Leila Lawliet M, that was brutal!  (Matti ninjas out again.)

Serria, via Jennifer Fu, who let us include an excerpt from her Psychology essay discussing why Light Yagami is not a sociopath.

blAIRbender, who finally handed in her cosplay advice and gave us a good laugh (we happily trolled right back).

Samuel Ruiz, for voice acting Light Yagami in an audio version of Matti's drabble, and making her day in the process.

Tarot Mikami, for knowing when and how to play the Joker in this overview of Light's great story.

All that remained was to properly invite the Death Note community to join in. Thus the idea for a community feature was born: Death Note Month of... The Month of Light Yagami was introduced on Death Note News by Matti in the hopes that readers here would contribute some things throughout the month. She waited, anxiously, to see how the idea might be received. She really, really wanted this to be a thing.

Then it happened, artist Tate Forkel appeared from the wild, and from thereon, there was no stopping the rest of you.

Thank you Matti, for bringing us together with such a fun event.


                So.