But Bay of Blood's stature in the annals of horror filmdom doesn't just lie in the fact that Bava got there first. As a director (and cinematographer), he was also celebrated for a visually poetic brand of sadism that finds its manga equivalent in Battle Royale. Even when his films were nonsense (c.f. Blood And Black Lace), they were often visually breathtaking, especially when it came to visually documenting his movie victims' leave-taking.

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Which brings us (finally) to our graphic novel. Takami & Taguchi's series is set in a future dystopia ("As military dictatorships go," Keith Giffen notes in his efficient English adaptation, "it could be worse. But not by much.") where the downtrodden masses are regularly entertained by a series entitled The Program. In it, a class of ninth graders are selected by lottery, transported against their will to a heavily booby-trapped island and then ordered to go General Zaroff on each other's ass. It's reality programming taken to the extreme - the only one allowed off the island is the ultimate sole survivor - with plenty of gleeful camera shots of each bloody victim. As readers, we get to glimpse several full-page panels of dangling eyeballs and gaping faces: when Volume One opens, two young orphan boys are shown watching their favorite anime actioner, only to have it interrupted by a news flash shot of The Program's most recent "winner," a mad teenage girl with her face half torn off.

Those two orphans, Shuuya & Yoshi, will of course grow to be drafted into the government's Most Dangerous Game Show. Their entire class is gassed and shanghaied on a bus trip, then flown to a remote island. The students wake in an unfamiliar classroom where The Program's gloating overseer, Mr. Kamon, tells them the rules of the game and brags about raping the sweet orphanage housemother, Ms. Ryoko. (Whether this last really occurred or not is up for interpretation - it quickly becomes apparent that Kamon is the kind of s.o.b. who'd say anything to work up his "students" - but we get a gratuitous image of the described event, anyway.) Each student, we learn, has been equipped with an electronic collar around their necks; should they attempt to opt out of The Program, the collars will be detonated.

Much of Volume One is devoted to explicating the story set-up; we don't fully get out of Mr. Kamon's classroom until Chapter Seven. In the opening chapter, we meet eight of the story's forty-two classmates, but the only two who initially make a lasting impression are Shuuya & Yoshi. The other six are introduced through quick-cut vignettes that deliberately blend into each other. In a way, this confusion is consistent with the demands of a story where the primary conflict resides in the unknow-ability of other people, but it also forces the reader to do some work from the get-go. Each classmate is also assigned a number (our apparent hero Shuuya is Boy #15), which fits into both the game structure of The Program and also works to remind us that we're reading a story with a high body count.