We’re not always in control. Even when it looks like we have the powers of the gods at our command, it’s provisional. Nature, fate, and mankind too, all have their ways of getting their due.

I don’t want to make it sound like the main lesson to be learned in the second volume of Black Jack is “Give up”—it’s not, and Osamu Tezuka makes that clear time and again. But he also makes it clear that it’s not wise to equate absolute power with absolute control. You can’t stop nature from running its course in its own way—sometimes all you can do is stand back and let things happen, and it takes a wise man to know when to stand back. And sometimes it hurts like hell to do so.

If you haven’t read the series yet, Black Jack’s central premise—an unlicensed surgeon, an apparently amoral figure who can perform miracles for six- and seven-digit sums—probably sounds like a setup for stories where the biggest tests are the limits of the protagonist’s skills. That’s just the setup—the springboard that Tezuka uses to propel us into his universe of difficult moral and ethical choices. There’s one moment in this volume where Black Jack performs a delicate bit of surgery in complete darkness, and it’s not because he’s showing off: he’s trying to engineer a solution to a dilemma that has no easy solution.

The most pleasant surprise of Black Lagoon Vol. 3 is how it isn’t just about the “gun love”, in the words of the “absolutely freakin’ not for children” parental advisory block. There’s the gun-fu, to be sure—along with the gun-jitsu, and the gun-kwan-do—but there’s also a generous dollop of several other different kinds of underworld grit. The crew of the Lagoon put their bread on the table thanks to the New World Disorder: terrorism and smuggling and human trafficking, but also the way those things shape the different characters’ philosophies and outlooks. This is the world that creates badasses, and in volume 3 you learn a little bit more about how and why.

You didn’t have to look very far last time around to get an idea of just how twisted people can get when the underworld is all they know. Viz.: the brother-and-sister team of kinder-assassins, Hansel and Gretel. They’re like something out of a Bobbsey Twins book as written by Hannibal Lecter, and they are creating serious problems for Balalaika and Hotel Moscow. Ditto Chang, the local triad boss; he’s suffered ghastly losses no thanks to these two, and rather reluctantly partners with Balalaika to send these two kids packing into the great day-care center in the sky.

With the English-language release of BoBoBo-Bo Bo-bobo, I now have an answer to a question that has bothered me persistently: What would you get if the Monty Python crew dosed themselves with peyote and took over writing duties for Fist of the North Star? Well, now I know, although I can’t really consider myself any the wiser for knowing. Weirded out, maybe, but not wiser.

One doesn’t read Bo-bobo; one is mugged by it. It is the only manga I have read so far that could sport a clinical diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder. There is no guarantee that what happens on facing pages or even adjacent panels will have anything to do with each other. Sometimes they simply don’t, and then the author/artist, Yoshio Sawai, will put the characters through agonizing contortions of illogic to maybe make it seem like they possibly have something to do with each other … or not. It’s weather-in-Chicago humor: if you didn’t laugh this time, turn the page.

There is something very intimidating in the way we have seen more of Japan’s own literary pop culture appear in English in the last few years alone than across almost all the previous years. “Literary pop culture” means the things written in Japan, for Japanese audiences, and not necessarily written to bolster that country’s literary prestige in the eyes of the world. That’s everything from the Vampire Hunter D and Dirty Pair light novels to NISIOISIN, from Miyuki Miyabe’s Crossfire and Brave Story (which are two incredibly dissimilar books for the same author) to the Guin Saga, from Edogawa Rampo’s Black Lizard to Kōji Suzuki’s Ring cycle.

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.

Volume two of Black Lagoon, like volume one, sports the following warning label: “Black Lagoon is rated M for Mature and is recommended for mature readers. This volume contains graphic violence, strong language, nudity, adult situations, drinkin’, smokin’, asskickin’, law-breakin’, gun love, running with scissors and just about everything your mother told you not to do.” Well, I’ve read both volumes cover to cover twice, and I am immensely disappointed to report that there is not a single scene of anyone running with scissors. There is, however, everything else on that list, so I can’t exactly cite them for false advertising.

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.)

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.

If you love a series because it plays to a whole array of personal fascinations, is that a bad thing? Nightmare Inspector is an anthology of things I adore without apology—1920s Japan, gorgeously dreamy art, and of course manga itself—but at the same time, I know I’d be doing a disservice to anyone reading this if I didn’t review it instead of simply gushing about it.

And so with the third volume, the series has settled into a comfortable formula, although one where they ring enough twists on the basics to make it perennially interesting instead of leaden and repetitive. Each night a new customer comes to the Silver Star Tea House, seeking the aid of Hiruko the baku or dream-eater. He’ll devour their nightmares for them, and often play amateur psychoanalyst while doing so … but what his clients find is not always what they have been seeking. The way each search is visualized and played off is a big part of the fun, and the conclusions to each story often involve a clever O. Henry-style twist. There’s very little meta-plot in this particular volume, and so the individual stories tend to be highly self-contained, but the few times such connections come up they hint at a larger and more all-encompassing storyline that’s only just now being hinted at.

Word has it the guy was nearly blown to bits when he was a kid, which explains that ugly piebald face and that mess of scars all over it—none of which is completely hidden by that also-ugly shock of white hair. The string tie and the cape he’s always wearing only make him seem all the more aloof. Small wonder people only go to him, with suitcases full of cash in hand, when they’re desperate. No one hires Black Jack, the underground doctor, unless they absolutely have to. And even when you do hire him, there’s no guarantee you’re going to get exactly what you ask for.

Consider the case of Acudo, son of the billionaire Nikula. The kid was a bad seed; nobody disputed that. Drove his car right into a phone pole and ended up a barely-living pile of meat. Nikula threw around money like it was falling leaves to get someone to heal his son—and sure enough, he got Black Jack to do the job. Trouble was, even Black Jack couldn’t do anything for the kid without some donor parts … and so Nikula was only too happy to railroad some poor kid, a tailor named Davy, into “providing” his body for the noble cause. What Nikula didn’t expect was for Black Jack to pull a switcheroo on everyone and give that poor Davy a way out. That’s Black Jack for you: two-fisted surgeon of the underworld and equally covert humanitarian. He may not tell you he cares, but he’ll show you … that is, if you’ve earned it.

When Viz announced their VIZBIG line of reprint editions for select titles, I couldn’t help but let my mind go scurrying off in a dozen directions at once. Three volumes in one for the price of two; an 8 ½” × 6” trim size, French flaps, top-notch print quality … the last time I was this jazzed was when I found out the Criterion Collection was preparing to offer its catalog titles in Blu-ray. But if Criterion was offering The Man Who Fell To Earth and The Last Emperor, what did Viz have planned?

As it turns out, they picked one of the best titles they could possibly have elected to offer in the VIZBIG format. I speak of Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond, which is not only one of the best titles Viz has under its wing right now but probably one of the best manga to see print, period. I try not to hyperbolize, but believe me, this is one of the few times where the comic in question is worth every bit of the fanboy gush. Doubly so in this edition, which not only gives you that much more Musashi for the money but serves it up on a page that’s even bigger and bolder than the original editions did.

When you open what you know to be the last volume of a manga series, you tend to go in with preconceptions or second guesses about how everything’s going to turn out. With Dororo, I thought I had all the cards face-up on the table after the first two books: the hero, Hyakkimaru, was going to win back all of the missing body parts demons had stolen from him; and Hyakkimaru’s impish sidekick Dororo was going to earn Hyakkimaru’s sword for himself at last.

It doesn’t quite work out that way, for reasons that seem at least as much due to Tezuka’s production schedule as the mechanics of the story he was telling. Dororo’s final volume wraps things up with a little too much haste for my own comfort—but at the same time, it doesn’t feel thematically wrong. Everyone gets what they have had coming for a long time. That and what might come off as middling (or rushed, or clumsy) for Tezuka is still outstanding by anyone else’s yardstick—and really, the whole of Dororo is more than worth the cash and the effort. “Nobody is born whole,” reads the blurb on the back cover, and now that I’m done with the series it makes sense as more than just ad copy.