Dream with Our Eyes Open

The Black Lagoon manga is back after another hiatus.

The crime organizations that run the city of Roanapur have reached a fragile and likely temporary peace. The ceasefire might be shattered by the latest events, though: someone (actually, several someones) has been targeting big black men around the city. The victims are associated with a variety of Roanapur's leading crime syndicates, so the heads of those organizations together request the Lagoon Company to investigate. It seems clear that Dutch will be on the list of targets, so the Lagoon crew don't hesitate for a nanosecond to accept the job.

And besides, this may give Rock, Revy, and Benny more information about their mysterious boss.

Hiroe's art style has gone weirdly backwards: he's using the classic manga Big Eyes, Small Mouth style seen in the first couple of tankoubon volumes. In the previous couple of volumes, his drawings of Dutch and Benny in particular were showing a craggier, more realistic look, and Balalaika, Rock, and Revy were drawn a bit more realistically as well. Now everyone except Dutch looks rather like the child assassins Hansel and Gretel from the early days: youthful and creepily doll-like.

This arc is not resolved. I hope we don't have to wait another two and three years for it to finish.

Hi! I'm back too!

Volume 6 contains the complete "Greenback Jane" arc. Revy and Rock are back in Roanapur. Revy's cracked-out girl-talk reunion session with Eda at the Ripoff Church (featuring cards, booze, and guns) is interrupted by a frantic fugitive from violence: Jane Bai, master counterfeiter, who turns out to be the hottest piece of contraband in play in Roanapur at the moment. The rest of the story is a crazy caper that seesaws between frantic Loony Toons chase comedy and a building-destroying level of violence. There's a little romance (for one of the most unlikely characters), the return of Shenhua (as part of a quirky miniboss squad that puts Black Lagoon squarely over the line into fantasyland for the first time), and some very nice scenes for Eda, ranging from the wacky to the rather sinister.

Volume 6 also starts a new, longer arc, "El Baile de le Muerte" ("The Dance of Death"), which continues in Volume 7 and beyond. Given the name of the arc, no one should be surprised to see the return of Roberta the Maid (a/k/a the "Hound of Florencia") to Roanapur - but she's not the only interesting visitor to come back to the Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy. Her young master, Garcia Lovelace, shows up, trailing the hyperkinetic and well-armed teenaged domestic Fabiola Iglesias, who learned virtually everything she knows from Head Matron Roberta and has a similarly bad effect on bars and other criminal hideouts. Everyone's assuming that Roberta is out to revenge Garcia's father - but he was killed back in South America, so why is she in Thailand?

Clearly this one is going to go 'round and 'round ... this was from redbrunja, who assigned me Revy Two-Hand, the psychotic Chinese-American gunwoman from Black Lagoon. [ETA: I haz Revy icon nao!]

The Black Lagoon is a World War II–era PT boat — small, sturdy, fast, and maneuverable. Her crew, mercenaries and couriers of illegal goods, are stoic, tough African-American Vietnam vet Dutch; quirky blond Jewish-American tech/mechanic Benny; and psycho curvaceous Chinese-American gunwoman Revy (short for Rebecca), also known a Two-Hand for her ability to use a gun in either hand or both. During the first volume, their number increases by one when they obtain Japanese salaryman Rokuro - now known as Rock.

Rock is the reader's POV as the story follows the adventures of the Black Lagoon crew all around the teeming criminal underworld of Southeast Asia, with the fictional port city of Roanapur, Thailand, as their base. Kidnapping, arms smuggling, recovery of treasure from wrecks, murder, terrorism, exotic and disgusting porn, mayhem of all sorts, drugs — it's all part of Rock's world now. And although he's still often repulsed by what he's helping to accomplished, he proves surprisingly adept at coming up with outlandish but effective schemes to wreak havoc on the Lagoon squad's enemies.

Volume 4 takes a different turn as Rock and Revy accompany the elegant, way-beyond-ruthless Russian mob boss Balalaika on her mission to the yakuza in Japan. I miss Dutch and Benny and hope that the group will eventually be reunited.

In many ways, this should be only a guilty pleasure. It's violent as all get-out (rather like Blade of the Immortal with modern weapons), and scantily-clad buxom women are all over the place. One reviewer noted that most of the female characters are stereotypes in one way or another. But somehow the vibe is, in its way, bizarrely liberating. The women aren't any more exaggerated than the men, IMO, and they're often the more interesting characters.

Warning: the "Hansel and Gretel" plotline in vols. 2-3 involves child pornography. The subject is definitely not glorified, but it's very disturbing. It's also easily arguable that the Muslim terrorist Ibraha (vols. 3-4) is an unfortunate stereotype, although I don't know that he's any worse than anyone else in the story. You have been warned.