It’s intimidating, because where’s someone supposed to start reading with such a trove of riches now at hand? It’s the same problem I had with the Gundam franchise: there’s just so much of it and in so many incarnations, just picking a starting point has me going in circles. (I’ll probably just give up and start with Gundam SEED. Send hate mail to the email address above.)

For those reasons I’m all the more grateful to Del Rey for hooking up with Kodansha, their perpetual partner in cultural cross-pollination, to bring out a domestic edition of the first volume of Faust. Billed as “fiction and manga from the cutting edge of Japanese pop culture”, it more than lives up to the label. For seventeen bucks you get a nearly four-hundred page anthology of current pop-literary movers, shakers, creators and illustrators—a bentō box of goodies designed to appeal to both existing manga/anime/”visual culture” fans and people from outside that circle looking for a fresh set of cultural diversions. Just the sheer variety of the material sandwiched into this volume would be reason enough to recommend it.

Door Open at 8 AM has that station-between-the-stations feeling throughout: it’s a mixture (Mixtur, ha ha) of jazz/prog-rock record samples and seething, shearing electronics plus live-action recordings. It’s roughly closest in spirit to Merzbeat, both in the nature of the material transformed and the way the transformations play out. It hasn’t yet grown on me the way Merzbuddha and Yoshinotsune have, but I know it will—Merzbow’s music requires that you approach with empty hands, or you never seize it for yourself. It’s music you listen into, not just music you listen to.]]> Akita’s love of jazz and prog-rock come through in his own music, but not in predictable ways. Instead of aping the format of either, he tries to evoke the same sense of adventure—just with a different set of sounds. If a piece goes on to such length that it just becomes a part of the environment, that’s okay—there are jazz pieces that are no less self-effacing, and for the same reasons. I couldn’t describe to you every portion of Coltrane’s “Ascension”, but its overall feeling is unmistakable.

There’s countless instances of this sort of thing throughout Doors. Midway through the ten-minute “Lyons Wake”, there’s a sputtering racket that by degrees reveals itself to be a frantically cascading drumroll. One of them’s “noise” and the other one’s “music”; one of them is “rhythm” and the other is “chaos”—in short, it’s the same kind of knocking-together of the expectations that happened with “Ascension” or even Albert Ayler’s Spirital Unity, even if the latter is a lot more conventionally melodic.

Sometimes Akita just goes for pure sonic adventure instead. The opening of “Africa Brass Session, Vol. 2” (the album’s twenty-minute centerpiece) mixes a heavy pulsating sample with his twittering, swooping EMS synthi; like the central throb in Merzbuddha’s “mantras”, we come back to it time and again only to find that we have probably changed a good deal more than it has. The rest of the album, come to think of it, is built along the same lines, and I imagine I’ll find all the more in it when I listen to it again and again over the course of the coming year.

And there’s a bevy of other ingredients in volume two that they probably just couldn’t mention in that tiny little box. Neo-Nazis; Russian contract killers; gun-dealing, bubblegum-chewing nuns; a close-quarters gunfight in a submarine; and a pair of Romanian twin children who deal out sickening mayhem with great, goony smiles on their faces. This is not the manga you give to your mom to get her into the whole Japanese-popular-culture thing. Okay, maybe not my mother, but you get the idea. (I gave her Yotsuba&! and Mushishi. That seems to have done the trick.)

Matter of fact, it’s this tension that gives this story—and most of the rest of the volume—its heft. Rock doesn’t think much of Revy’s infantile gangsta attitude, and Revy’s prepared to write off Rock as a sniveling whiner. This leads to two pivotal scenes, the first being a deeply uncomfortable tete-a-tete in the bowels of the submarine, where Revy all but threatens to kill Rock for badmouthing her. The second is an even blunter showdown in broad daylight, where the two of them finally do come to blows but also manage to build on the grudging respect they’ve both been harboring for each other. Revy’s shown Rock that you can indeed live the way you want, and Rock’s made it clear to his new partner that you can’t solve every problem that comes your way by shooting at it. Not that she doesn’t try, mind you.

The second half of the book deals with two entirely new characters—an androgynous brother-and-sister pair, two of “Ceauşescu’s orphans” who survived the hellish underground they were adopted into by becoming even deadlier than their exploiters. They are now contract assassins, although you have to question the logic (to say nothing of the sanity) of hiring a pair like this when efficiency and discretion are keynotes in your line of business. They’ve been hired to throw a monkey wrench into the workings of “Hotel Moscow”—Balalaika’s operation—and it’s Rock, of all people, who provides everyone with crucial clues as to their identity.

Nobody needs to be told that Black Lagoon is designed to be violent, crass and politically incorrect. That said, this latter segment is a real test of nerve: if there mere idea of something like Gunslinger Girl made you squirm—if, in short, anything involving the exploitation of children makes you uncomfortable—you’re going to be repulsed. It’s not even so much a question of what’s shown, but what’s implied, and the amoral atmosphere of the goings-on that makes this part tough to swallow. It’s more Ichi the Killer than Lethal Weapon (or even Hard-Boiled), but let’s face it—the fact that Revy is on the cover shoving a gun into your snoot should be a strong hint of what you’re in for.

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 does double-gun duty into adjacent panels.

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: 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 one, to which I’ve now added a copy of volume two purchased with my own cash. 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. To my surprise, many things that I thought were translator’s inventions were in fact originally there in some form. When I came across the sentence “Anyone that thinks those two [assassins] are normal would think Andrew Dice Clay is the f—king messiah!”, I checked the Japanese edition, and sure enough, the Dice Man himself is the one being name-checked.

As with the previous volume, there are a couple of contextual endnotes: one on the black market in Southeast Asia, and another on the Russian Airborne Corps (the unit that gave Balalaika her infamy).

The Bottom Line: The warning label on Black Lagoon goes double for the second volume, and will no doubt apply to the rest in the series as well. If you’re not easily offended and you’re curious about how a manga take on Hong Kong / hardcore Hollywood action cinema would play out, grab this. Just remember that it’s in shinkwrap for a good reason.

I almost broke my own fingers digging out my wallet.

Ashes of Time was maverick Hong Kong director Kar-Wai Wong's foray into martial-arts epic territory, and it had roughly the same trajectory as a movie like Blade Runner. It was costly and long in the making, and a test of patience for all involved. Greeted with hostility and poor box office take on its release, it languished in obscurity at first but built up a cult following; in this case, fans of the director's other movies learned about it and sought out what few copies could be found on home video.

A decade ago, Wong started to buy up as many prints of the movie as he could find, since the original negatives had been stored poorly and were now disintegrating. For five years he poured his own money and sweat into restoring the movie, and it's now being released into theaters thanks to the good graces of Sony Pictures Classics.

From the New York Times:

When Mr. Wong set out to make “Ashes” in the early 1990s, it was a boom time in the Hong Kong film industry, which was churning out more than 200 features a year. And he was tapping into a resurgence in wuxia pictures with this adaptation of Louis Cha’s celebrated multipart novel, “The Eagle-Shooting Heroes,” published in 1957-59. The novel featured two older antagonists, Ouyang Feng and Huang Yaoshi; Mr. Wong concocted a prequel that reimagined them as younger men and told how failed romance and emotional reticence sealed their fates. “I wanted to make them more human,” he said.

Odds are the remastered version will be released on DVD as well. When it is, I plan on sitting down with it, along with a copy of the original, and giving both of them their day in the sun.

So goes the opening chapter of Black Lagoon, which hits the ground running and body-checks us right into the middle of the plot. A friend of mine billed it as “an ‘80s action movie rendered as manga,” and that’s precisely what it is: a hail of cusswords, blood, beatings, and spent shell casings. It’s also a hell of a lot of fun, thanks to snappy writing that never slows down or comes up for air, and a cast full of characters who are all screwloose in different ways. Nominally I’d call a comic like this a guilty pleasure—ditto the TV series inspired by it—but it’s so confident in its excesses that the guilt is entirely optional.

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 bemused 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.