Fairy Tail Creator Takes on Battle Academy Themes in New Manga - Dead Rock Vol. 1 Review
Fairy Tail creator, Hiro Mashima, got his newest dark fantasy manga, Dead Rock, officially released in English on March 4th through Kodansha. Mashima has long been a well-renowned manga artist since his debut with Rave Master in 1999 and continued to grow in success while writing Fairy Tail and Edens Zero. He is now taking on battle academy themes in Dead Rock, as the story takes place in the demon world's most prestigious (and violent) academy. With manga and anime works set in academies being ever-increasingly popular, how does Mashima's take on the setting stand out?
Volume 1 of Dead Rock introduces a fun and bizarre cast of characters who are all attending Dead Rock Academy for their own reasons, starting with the story's main protagonist, Yakuto. While I haven't religiously kept up with all of Mashima's works, I'm well aware that he tends to recycle character designs—for better or worse. I've caught myself, and others, calling Edens Zero's Shiki "black-haired Natsu" and Farmagia's Ten "farmer Natsu." Mashima's art here also admittedly suffers from "same-face syndrome." It's not a huge criticism I have with manga artists (one of my favorites, Arina Tanemura, does this too), but this has made me less interested in each of Mashima's new works as they come out. Dead Rock, however, broke that pattern for me.
Yakuto stood out to me more than some of Mashima's previous protagonists based on his design alone. His darker skin tone and devious look set him apart from Natsu and Ten... at least enough for me. I dove into Dead Rock Volume 1, hoping to be at least as entertained as I was as a kid when watching Rave Master.
The shonen formula is perfectly laid out in Dead Rock. A powerful protagonist with goals to be even stronger, an edgy supporting character (that admittedly does look like Gray from Fairy Tail, sorry) with a seemingly traumatic past, and a well-endowed female character with an intense personality (oh, it's Erza... she has flames on her outfit and everything). Each character reveals a small sliver of their reasoning behind attending Dead Rock Academy, and there's surely more to unpack throughout the series. Everyone's main incentive to attend the academy is that graduates are offered a part of the human world that they will be able to rule.
I find the character, Mikoto, adorable, and her power is the most interesting out of all the characters, as she can revive the dead into her own personal slave zombies. Wait... can anyone actually die permanently in this manga? She might be the most OP character, and I look forward to seeing more of her.
Yakuto is strong from the very first chapter—just as OP as you may expect from a shonen main character. He's so incredibly strong that he is part of a group of only seven individuals that passed Dead Rock Academy's grueling exam, one that over 900 people died while participating in. We get a taste of Yakuto's abilities during the exam, but that's where the mystery lies. Yakuto is apparently of a race that seemingly died out years ago, the Black Dragons. Yakuto says he must kill anyone who witnesses this special power of his born from being a Black Dragon.
Things don't start getting interesting until the very end of Chapter 1. I won't be digging too deep into the story and potential spoilers here, but the plot starts getting spicy when Yakuto enters his classroom, immediately kills the professor, and states to his classmates his desire to kill the god of the demon world—also known as the principal of the academy. So, to wrap up the perfect cookie-cutter shonen formula, we have a young and powerful kid wanting to destroy god.
Hiro Mashima's Dead Rock features the best of his artistic abilities I've seen so far in his work. There are several explosive two-page spreads with a striking sense of movement and thrill, and the more solemn pages are just as gripping. Despite what I said earlier about "same-face syndrome", Mashima's character's facial expressions seem well thought about and executed, helping Dead Rock's cast stand out just a bit more. I'll mention Mikoto again, as her curious expressions and mysterious gazes got me quite interested in her.
Sometimes at the end of shonen manga volumes, I feel strongly about not continuing if it doesn't do anything special. Dead Rock, however, has several things going for it that will keep me locked in for volume 2, which releases this June. One is that you never know what turn each chapter is going to make. For example, I never expected Yakuto to walk into class and kill the teacher, that's for sure.
Another standout for me in this manga, so far, is how the academy functions. You are free to kill people in the academy that you simply just don't like. I don't think Dead Rock Academy will be anything like U.A. from My Hero Academia. It'll definitely be more chaotic, and the first volume of the manga already showcases the kinds of violent and bloody situations the students can catch themselves in. Volume one of shounen-battle manga tend to lay out a plethora of characters before developing them, so I feel that these types of works need at least a three-volume rule in the way that many people give anime the three-episode rule. These reasons are enough to have me pick up Volume 2 in June... and the fact that Volume 1 ends in a huge cliffhanger.
There are three chapters compiled into volume one of Dead Rock. The localization from Kodansha features Erin Subramanian as the translator, James Dashiell as the digital edition letterer, AndWorld Design as the print edition letterer, and Cayley Last as the print edition editor. The English edition is clear and easy to read as it doesn't feature any awkward translations or unnecessary slang. I'm a rather slow manga reader, but I was able to finish up the volume in about an hour, completely engaged by the text.
Dead Rock is darker, grittier, bloodier, and edgier than any other Hiro Mashima work I've read in the past, and so far I'm enjoying his take on the battle academia setting. Kodansha released the physical and digital versions of Dead Rock on March 4th, 2025. You can order the release on their website.
Dead Rock © Hiro Mashima/Kodansha Ltd.