If you’re the kind of person who fancies a good car chase, who likes her dialogue punchy and profane, or who just enjoys watching stuff blow up, this week’s Short Takes column is for you. All three titles — Black Lagoon (VIZ), Dogs: Bullets & Carnage (VIZ), and Zone-00 (Tokyopop) — are veritable festivals of testosterone, filled with enough action and macho shop talk to satisfy the most discriminating John Woo or Michael Bay fan. But which one offers the best bang for the buck? Read on for the full scoop.

BLACK LAGOON,VOL. 6

BY REI HIROE • VIZ • 208 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)

Meet the crew of the Black Lagoon, a vintage torpedo boat manned by modern-day pirates. There’s Dutch, the amoral commander; Benny, the crew’s fix-it guy; Revy Two Hand, the ship’s muscle; and Rock, a hapless salaryman who joined the crew after a botched kidnapping attempt. (His, to be exact.) The Black Lagoon operates in the South Pacific, taking jobs that put them into direct conflict with a colorful assortment of Hong Kong gangsters, Russian and Italian mobsters, South American drug dealers, and big corporations. Volume six finds the gang embroiled in two very different schemes. In the first story, “Greenback Jane,” Revy and Rock harbor a counterfeiter who’s pissed off customers on two continents, while in the second, “El Baile de La Muerte,” the revolutionary-cum-maid-assassin Roberta returns to avenge the murder of the Lovelace family patriarch. Both stories are really just pretexts for the kind of lengthy gun battles that John Woo popularized with Hard Boiled and The Killer: characters leap through the air firing two pistols at once, somersault over fiery obstacles, and dodge bullets with uncanny skill, all while looking impossibly cool and stylish. It’s easy to catalogue Black Lagoon’s weaknesses, from Rei Hiroe’s excessive use of speedlines to his unshakable belief that gun-toting nuns and maids make everything twice as much fun, but the series has great energy and spirit; for all the shoot-outs and silly poses, the story is at its most enjoyable when Revy and Rock trade boozy insults at a bar with Mamet-esque verve.

The bottom line: Black Lagoon is a great guilty pleasure.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media, LLC.

DOGS: BULLETS & CARNAGE, VOL. 1

BY SHIROW MIWA • VIZ • 212 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a group of disaffected outsiders roam an urban dystopia, running afoul of the law and various criminal syndicates while laying waste to everything in their path. That’s the basic premise of Dogs: Bullets & Carnage, a slick yet soulless sci-fi adventure about three mercenaries, Badou, Heine, and Naoto, each of whom is on a personal quest to recover a piece of his or her past. Heine, for example, is plagued by disturbing flashbacks of brutally killing someone close to him, while Naoto seeks an assassin who carries the same distinctive weapon that she does. Their destinies are about to converge “Underground,” a lawless region that neither police nor common criminals dare visit.

I’ll give Shirow Miwa his due: Dogs certainly looks cool. The character designs are tod chic (everyone looks like a member of the Baader Meinhof gang), the setting is suitably oppressive, and the fight scenes are staged with panache. Yet Dogs is all surface detail and no substance. None of the characters rise above the level of type, nor do their backstories register as anything more than contrivances to keep the plot grinding along. There’s some suggestion that human trafficking and genetic engineering are endemic “down below,” but that idea isn’t really developed; if anything, the genetic experiment angle provides Miwa with a nifty excuse to draw young, vulnerable characters with wings, cat ears, and tails. None of this would matter if Miwa didn’t take the premise so seriously. His refusal to lighten up, however, yields a turgid, moody, and relentlessly violent story that leaves the reader simultaneously bruised and bored.

The bottom line: Unless you can’t get enough of angstful killers in leather and eyepatches, skip this noisy, empty book.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media, LLC.

ZONE-00, VOL. 1

BY KYO QJO • TOKYOPOP • 192 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

If you’ve ever watched a trailer that touted the producer’s association with a bigger, more successful project (e.g. “From the producer of Rambo comes a love story…”), you know that studios seldom use this gambit for promoting the latest Meryl Streep film. So when I saw the phrase, “from the artist of Trinity Blood” on the cover of Zone-00, my heart sank: was this the best that Tokyopop could say about this demonic thriller? Alas, the answer turned out to be yes.

The story, or what passes for one, focuses on two high school students: Kujo, a cheerful, wide-eyed enthusiast who, despite his innocent appearance, is actually a five-hundred-year-old ogre, and Shima, a cool, calculating demon hunter who looks ever-so-slightly like Sally Jesse Raphael (remember her?) with his short blond hair and oversized glasses. By rights, the two should be enemies, but Kujo and Shima find themselves working together to solve a series of brutal killings linked to Zone-00, an underground drug that transforms users into flesh-hungry killers.

Zone-00 is easily one of the most confusing and unappealing books I’ve read this year, a fever dream of decapitations, impalements, and half-naked bodies. The layout is dark and busy — overstuffed, really — looking more like a Tokidoki handbag pattern than sequential art, with images and word balloons filling every inch of the page. From time to time, Qjo’s rich, weird imagination shines through, as when she introduces a pair of possessed Harley Davidsons, or stages a hilarious conversation between a cat and a dog about the merits of fanservice. (The cat is pro-panty shot; the dog is more modest.) Too often, however, Zone-00 seems like a grab bag of half-baked ideas and pin-up drawings in search of a story; about the best I can say for Zone-00 is that the fanservice is equal opportunity, as almost every page features ladies with gravity-defying H-cups and men with granite six-packs.

The bottom line: Avoid Zone-00 like the plague.