Books: Black Lagoon Vol. #1

The plot for the first book essentially involves Rokuro going from a scared, hapless victim of circumstance to … well, not exactly one of the gang, but at least someone who can take his destiny into his own hands. He has no idea what sort of hijinks his company has been involved in — and his company isn’t too keen on the truth getting out, either. To that end, his employers cut him off and leave him for dead, and send out a rival bunch of hardened mercenaries to blow him and the rest of the crew of the Black Lagoon out of the ocean.

The other crewmembers swim out of the chaos one by one: Dutch, the black heavy with more grace under pressure than most five men; Benny, the technician, who finds life aboard the ship preferable to getting hunted by both the Mafia and the FBI; and most importantly, Revy, the tattooed Chinese-American gunslinger girl, voted Most Likely To Live Fast, Die Hard And Leave A Terrific-Looking Corpse. They don’t have a lot of patience for “Mr. Japanese” at first, but as he calms down and tries to think about his situation instead of simply freaking out, he discovers something: He’s got a remarkable aptitude for improvising. When they’re holed up at one end of a river with a war copter waiting for them, Rock thinks of a solution. It is so suicidally insane that the rest of the crew can’t help but rub their hands and try it out, and the way the plan plays out on the page generates a massive laugh. Whether or not “Rock” is entirely comfortable with it, he’s found a place among them — even if he spends a good deal of his time trying to stop Revy from biting his head clean off.

Most of the work on the Lagoon comes courtesy of Balalaika, a Russian giantess whose beauty is marred by both her total cold-bloodedness towards her enemies and a nasty scar (a burn mark?) on her face. Loyalty works both ways for her, though: when a Chinese gangster lets his jaw flap a little too readily for her taste, she trusses the guy up in his hotel room on top of a pile of plastique, blasts him into orbit, and lets Dutch listen in on the mayhem as a way to put a smile on his face. (His words: “She says business is booming.” Groan, groan.) She’s content to hire the Lagoon crew rather than bring them wholly into her fold, or go into theirs — maybe only because she’s amused by the outlandish way they get themselves into and out of trouble.

This isn’t to say that the crewmembers of the Lagoon take a similarly amoral attitude towards their work. Sometimes they’re just slow to catch on. In the story that spans most of the second half of the book, they’re charged with transporting a kid, Garcia Lovelace, heir to a wealthy family that’s fallen on hard times. Something’s fishy about the whole deal, but Rock’s the only one of the bunch who has qualms (at least at first) about the fact that they’re transporting a kid to be sold to the highest bidder. There’s someone else who’s mighty upset about it, too — the Lovelace family maid, Roberta, with her skirt full of grenades and the tenacity of the T-1000. Some of the same moves, too: there’s a moment straight out of T2 itself where Roberta smashes her way through the rear window of a moving car. Revy doesn’t take kindly to there being more than one tough-as-depleted-plutonium female in the vicinity, and when the two of them run out of bullets to shoot at each other they go at it Lethal Weapon-style, with bare fists. (In a story like this, nobody stops to ask how Roberta can get pummeled repeatedly in the face and yet never break her glasses.)

Reading Black Lagoon made me wonder about something I’ve heard before under different circumstances. Anime and manga have traditionally been by-Japan-for-Japan efforts, but in the last few years, the export market for both has grown exponentially. How many such productions are created these days with at least one eye on the rest of the world? Black Lagoon in particular feels so much like something that was designed at least in part to be sold abroad — although I’d be willing to think there’s a simpler explanation. By all accounts Rei Hiroe’s manga was simply created in frank homage to Western (and Hong Kong) action cinema, so it’s probably less a case of tailoring the material for maximum salability than the material itself being an indirect product of one of its many possible audiences. After all, one of the characters is named Donnie Yen — I’m convinced it’s not a coincidence — and then there’s the scene where Revy blows away a whole shipful of mercs while singing along to White Zombie’s “Electric Head Pt. 1”. If Hiroe put those things in there because he thought they were cool, I’m betting there’s a bunch of people reading this with $13 in hand who agree completely.

Art: When the animated version of Black Lagoon appeared Stateside, it sported an only slightly modified and cleaned-up version of Hiroe’s art style. It’s masculine and bold, but also full of playful energy and wild, Michael Bay-like POVs — check out the panel where Revy gives us a slightly-too-close view of her backside when leaping overhead to take out a few bad guys. (And, heck, I also loved the cutesy touches like the little fang that appears in her mouth whenever she’s being supercilious.)

The art also doesn’t suffer from the cold, over-polished seinen look that you see in something like Ryoichi Ikegami’s work — Hiroe’s having as much fun drawing this as we have reading it. The book’s also loaded with splashy character designs, from Revy’s tribal shoulder tats and Daisy Duke cutoffs to Balalaika’s Soviet-army surplus fashions. Best of all, the book’s in a slightly larger trade paperback size (8 ¼ × 5 ¾) — bigger than the original tankōbon printing, which allows the art to stand out all the more in all its sassy glory.

Translation: The short version: Someone give these people a medal.

Okay, now the long, long version. (Brew some coffee.)

Back when Viz first announced Black Lagoon at Comic-Con East, I was one of the lucky few who walked out of that panel with a prize: a copy of the original Japanese-language edition of volume 1. Even with my relatively limited command of Japanese (as I put it to the publicity manager, “I know just enough to get into trouble”), I could tell Lagoon would require any translator to make tough decisions about what to keep and in what form. There are many places where Hiroe has the characters speak directly in English right on the page (especially Revy), or intermix English into their Japanese (as Dutch does, probably as a way to depict how he speaks English to Japanese readers!), or speak directly in Russian (Balalaika) or Spanish (Roberta). It’s brutally eclectic.

The good news is that the translator, Dan Kanemitsu, kept all this and more in mind, and created a translation that’s both faithful and accessible in all of its eccentric uses of language. When something was rendered in both another language and in Japanese in the original, here the Japanese has been rendered into English and the original language left intact. Many balloons that featured Hiroe’s lettering in English have been left as-is with only minimal corrections — e.g., Revy’s killer catchphrase in the very first episode, “DEAD AS F — IN’ FRIED CHICKEN, BUSTER!”, has been left as-is. (They even kept Hiroe’s lettering for Revy’s renditions of White Zombie, et al.; I was worried they would balk at having to shell out cash to license the lyrics, but there they are.)

What’s even better is how Kanemitsu keeps all the brilliantly vulgar dialogue from the original exactly as it should be. Example: Revy’s cussing out of Benny in the first chapter: “Damare, yotsume [megane-yaro]!” (だまれ、四つ目［メガネヤロー］！) becomes “Shut it, four eyes!” Many other, far more gloriously filthy invectives — as when a thug snarls “she’ll cook my balls along with my ass!” (re: Balalaika) — also get class-A treatment. And then there’s the use of the F word, which in many cases was there to begin with. In the original, English-speaking characters used it in a Japanese transliteration (fakku), and it’s been both kept in and added where it seems appropriately crude. Revy drops F-bombs all throughout, many of which were there to begin with (as when at one point she groans “F — ing Christ!” while sprawled butt-over-teacups on the deck of her ship).

Kanemitsu is a longtime veteran of the manga translation scene. He did the equally pop Initial D manga, and also lent his talents to bringing the Excel Saga manga (another Viz port) to English readers. The latter was done in conjunction with Carl Gustav Horn, and each single volume sports more annotations than the whole of Jay Rubin’s recent translation of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s Rashōmon did. It sounds absurd, but think about it: fifty years from now, we’ll probably need a whole book of footnotes to understand a single episode of The Simpsons or South Park.

Because so much of the annotation for a story like this is right in the panels — for the most part, you either get the references or you don’t — the amount of bonus material is minimal. A couple of notes from the author bookend the main text, and there are two notes about Revy’s nickname (“Two Hand” — this was intentional and not a case of Engrish mangling anything, actually) and the Black Lagoon itself.

The Bottom Line: Black Lagoon comes crammed with goodies: a cast of compulsively watchable characters, a love of action-adventure pop culture that drips from every single panel, and enough action to give you motion sickness even if you’re just sitting still. It hits so many sweet spots, you might get diabetes.