It's hard not to compare Dai Dark to Q Hayashida's last series, Dorohedoro, since I burned through that entire manga run pretty quickly. It's not surprising that the creator would move on to something that while stylistically similar has vastly different setting.

Dai Dark definitely nails the intriguingly weird set up, as it focuses on a young man who possess a strange and deadly power, and spends his time traveling in space with a magical skeleton backpack.

One volume may actually not be enough to assess this one. Dorohedoro just had much clearer stakes: A man in a magic city was turned into a lizard, and he wants to find who did it. Boom, there's your protagonist agency. Dai Dark is a bit more nebulous about its goals.

This leads to an issue I hadn't even considered until reading this: Q Hayashida works best when exploring relationships. They're a creator with a real knack for exploring different kinds of friendship, and it seems like the first volume of Dai Dark spends so much time on set up that it couldn't really build anything up yet. The main focus is a boy and his backpack, but the first few chapters don't even really get into the nature of their bond much.

Dai Dark definitely has the dark weirdness of Hayashida's previous work, but it may take a while to see if its characters develop enough to make it a lasting series.