3 out of 5

Volume 3 of Black Lagoon bounces between the series’ thus far best and worst aspects: the intermingling of insane cinema action with moral / political quandaries – often posed by Lagoon newbie Rock – surrounding the team’s missions, and indulgent genre / fanservice stuff.

The end of the Bloodsport Fairytale arc is generally really strong, bringing the fantastical over-violence to a very dark conclusion, and digging into the series’ theme of humanity’s bend towards its worst and most self-serving attributes. Setting aside some questionable shock-value gender play (maybe there’s some allowance for this as part of the scene in general, and also that the book was written in the early 00s), the way the assassin twins’ denouement is handled is pretty movingly grim.

…Except in how it doesn’t linger. Black Lagoon’s arcs feel way too isolated at this point, carrying over some grudges from story to story, but not necessarily the character development. And that hits hardest post this arc, which started eye-rollingly over-the-top, but became pretty heavy.

Goat, Jihad, Rock’n Roll then starts, poking at the moral greys of how conflicting ideologies can be bedfellow when it comes to money- or power grabs. Again: very intriguing subject matter, but Hiroe makes it very hard to follow with the constantly shifting cast, and a kind of dodgy grasp on the “point” of these things. Like, in pursuit of a general nihilism, it’s hard to take any given conversation too seriously, and indeed, with the aforementioned way we seem to just jump from arc to arc, that bears out.

Art-wise, while the action is still much clearer, I’m realizing I have another issue with “reading” it: Hiroe very loosely switches camera angles frequently, always in pursuit of the coolest perspective, but it breaks some cinematic rules in terms of how we track a scenario in our mind. You can sort of “feel” what’s happening in the scene, but I have to fight to follow it a panel-by-panel level, repositioning where we are in the scene as it goes along. The strange, tailless dialogue bubbles don’t help – I suppose I need the hint of knowing who’s speaking, whereas Rei tends to rely on the position of the bubble for that (but then will sometimes use a tail if that needs to change, whereas this should really be cleaned up in the panel layout).

Lastly, I still can’t really understand Rock’s role in the team (see above about character development stalling), and Revy’s shorts keep getting shorter, and/or she (aka Hiroe…) keeps finding new, fun ways to shove her taint in our faces. I have feelings about this that maybe suggest I’m not the target audience.

Black Lagoon remains a compelling mash-up of high- and low-brow ideas, but I’m getting to a breaking point in terms of being okay with the mash-up not really evolving.