Black Lagoon 9

Rei Hiroe – Viz – 2010 – 9+ volumes

Ugh.  I just realized this and Kobato both ran in Sunday GX.  That’s like the time I realized all the insane things that ran regularly in Young Animal (Berserk, Detroit Metal City, Futari H, March Comes in Like a Lion), except I really hate Kobato and it doesn’t belong.

Anyway.  I think this series has won me over, and I was happy to see that skipping a volume didn’t leave me in the lurch.  The characters are still trying to track down the killer maid, except I think the last volume must’ve focused on Revy and a few side characters, and this one instead focused on the American soldiers, the Lovelace kid, and bringing the whole story to a close.

This is a long volume, and you’re getting a lot of bang for your buck here.  There’s tons of action, and while I started the volume with a bad attitude about the action scenes, I wound up enjoying all of them quite a bit.  There are occasions where individual panels don’t quite make sense, but I can tell what’s going on in this volume a lot more than I could the previous ones.

With all the story here, there are some extraneous talking scenes (the Lovelace kid has way too much story time, and the scenes where the killers ponder their lots in life seem a little out-of-place), but most of it still felt like a necessary evil, stuff that we had to get out of the way before the story could move on.

The ending… mmm, I wasn’t completely satisfied with it, but I think the best part was what Fabiola said to Rock on the way out.  As much as I’ve read, what she said was complete fabrication, and he seems like a good guy in the middle of all the bad, but everyone takes it very seriously, including Rock.  I do like her point, though, and it did make me go back and think about him.

The actual resolution to the story was a little wonky and underwhelming, slightly off from what I’d expect of Black Lagoon, but all the same, it seemed pretty consistent with all the talking and whatnot in this volume.

I think Dogs is still my current go-to title for gratuitous and stylized seinen action, but it’s been awhile since I’ve read that one.  I need to pick up the new volumes of that, and the old volumes of this series (it looks like we’re caught up with Japan and will be for quite some time), and see how the two compare.  Black Lagoon may come out on top in terms of over-the-top action.  Neither has much of a role in this book, but I think the Revy/Rock duo (with one good for insane battles and the other serving as a wussy balance) is my favorite part, and I think the early volumes will focus on them a lot more, along with explaining just what exactly Rock is doing with the Black Lagoon in the first place.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.

edit: aww, I should have saved this and had another all-Black manga night, and invited Black Jack and Black Bird to the party, maybe pick up some old volumes of Black Cat and see where the night goes.