How is the Death Note manga collected in volumes?
Death Note ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from December 2003 to May 2006, and Shueisha's tankobon program kept pace in the modern Jump manner: volume 1 in April 2004, collecting the opening chapters through Light Yagami's first tests of the notebook, and a volume roughly every two months until volume 12 closed the series in October 2006. Twelve volumes is a tight, complete object by shonen standards, one of the reasons the series collects so cleanly.
The thirteenth volume, Death Note 13: How to Read, published in Japan in October 2006, is not a story volume but the series' official deep documentation: character files, the rules in full, interviews with Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, the pilot chapter and production material. It has its own page in this shelf, and any volume count of the manga that stops at twelve is missing the volume the creators treated as the key to the other twelve.
VIZ Media's English edition mirrors the Japanese program volume for volume, published from 2005 to 2007, with translation and lettering that made it one of the defining manga releases of the American manga boom. The English volumes carry their own cover furniture and age ratings, and their printings span the boom years, so early VIZ printings are period objects of the US market's fastest growth.
Later formats repackage the same twelve: the Black Edition omnibuses, the Japanese bunkoban and the all in one edition each have their own logic and their own pages or notes in this shelf. The tankobon remain the reference form, the size and rhythm the chapters were collected for, and the form in which Obata's covers, the subject of the covers page here, were designed to stand in a row.
For a collector the set's virtues are completeness and condition discipline: twelve matching volumes plus the thirteenth, Japanese obi on early printings where present, and no sprawling tail of specials required to call it done. Few major series can be finished this decisively, and the Short Stories volume of 2021, covered separately here, is an epilogue rather than a thirteenth story volume.
