One day rank-and-file salaryman Rokuro is kowtowing to his boss in his highrise Tokyo office, and the next thing he knows he’s getting punched in the face on the deck of a pirate ship somewhere in the South Pacific, blood on his shirt and guns stuffed up his nostrils. His captors are annoyed that the disk he was holding isn’t going to earn them more than chump change, so why not squeeze a little more sugar out of the deal by ransoming him back to his own employers? And again, before he knows it, he’s cowering behind the bar in some Vietnamese dive while one of his new mercenary buddies is doing the Chow Yun-Fat Two-Fist Pistol Pump on everyone else in sight with a face-splitting grin. And that’s the girl of the team.

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.