OK - one of my other commenters says: "it seems pretty faithful. As in, faithful to the very word. The only divergence I saw was that in the first episode, I WTFed a little because they were somehow on a river and there was no danger of the Black Lagoon dying a slow and painful death on a reef. But there was still jumping a boat in the air and shooting a torpedo at a helicopter, so I'm not inclined to think too hard about it."