By Hirohiko Araki
Published by Viz Media
At some point, if you're writing about a long-running shonen manga series, you reach a state in which you just scan pages and say, "Check out this crazy/awesome thing!" With Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, I think I might have reached that point after only six volumes. I mean, just look at the impossible anatomy in this splash page:
That's a depiction of our hero, Joeseph Joestar, and his rival/ally, Ceasar Anthonio Zeppeli, about to fight each other on the streets of Rome. I love how Caesar (the guy on the right) has upper arms that appear to be about four feet long, and how Joseph's neck seems to be sprouting out of his pectoral muscles (he's also pulling a total brokeback pose, making it look like his upper body has been severed, rotated 90 degrees, and then reattached).
This sort of thing is par for the course for Hirohiko Araki, who commits these crimes of anatomy on nearly every page of his comics, but that's part of his charm; you never know what sort of weirdness is going to come up next, with strange poses and anatomical impossibilities only being one part of the goofy whole. He also gives his characters strange, nonsensical methods of fighting, such as Caesar's soap bubble attacks:
And there's the prevalent gore, which we'll get to soon. The plot for these volumes sees Jojo and his pals searching for more of the evil "pillar men" like the guy he defeated in the previous volume. He and Caesar (who is the grandson of Baron Zeppeli, the teacher who trained Joseph's grandfather Jonathan back in the first part of the series), follow a lead from some Nazi friends of theirs (this part of the story takes place in 1938, and since they're in Italy, why not hang out with Nazis?) and check out some tunnels under the Colosseum, where they find that three weird dudes have just woken up and are preparing to take over the world or something, and they need to find some mysterious gem in order to do so. And if you thought the anatomy was strange before, just look at these guys, who seem to be about fifteen feet tall, with their legs taking up 70% of that height:
Santviento, the pillar man that Joseph previously defeated, was apparently at a lower power level than these guys (who are named Wamuu, Esidisi, and Kars), because one of them takes out Joseph and Caesar pretty easily, despite Joseph's ridiculous new special attack:
I love the display of power that Araki depicts here, with Wamuu nearly obliterating Joseph with some sort of wind attack:
It seems that these guys have been menacing humanity for thousands of years, and they've previously killed many other members of the "Hamon tribe," the people who use the breathing techniques that give Jojo and his pals the psychic powers to pull off awesome attacks. But through his arrogance, Joseph manages to impress them, and convinces them to give him a month to train and grow more powerful so that he can be a better match for them the next time they fight. And this being a battle manga, the all-powerful, evil bad guys say "Sure, why not?" and plan to meet them for another round in 33 days. They do, however, come up with a clever way to ensure that he won't run away:
So, we're off for a classic bit of shonen manga training, as Joseph and Caesar seek the master that trained Caesar in the way of Hamon. This brings them to Venice, where they encounter said master, who confronts them in an amusing manner and reveals a surprising identity:
Yep, that would be Lisa Lisa, who Araki notes in the volume's backmatter was kind of groundbreaking at the time (1986) as a female character who was strong both physically and in terms of personality. In reality, I don't know if she's really all that strong of a character; she mostly falls into the role of the mean trainer who forces her trainees to accomplish the impossible, but she's not a stereotypical giggling schoolgirl, so perhaps that's a positive change from the norm for female characters in manga at the time.
Anyway, they all proceed to Lisa Lisa's secret island training facility, where they have to face lots of impossible trials that demonstrate the awesome potential of their powers. After almost a month of training, they've definitely leveled up their powers, which is a good thing, since when Joseph goes to face his final test, who should he find waiting for him but Esidisi, who now appears to be wearing a costume that is stitched into his skin and includes cords wrapped around pegs that have been driven into his abs:
The two of them battle each other while standing on top of spikes, and there's plenty of weird and goofy stuff, like a bit in which Esidisi has a crying fit after Joseph cuts off his arm:
He also reveals that his secret power is heating up his blood and injecting it into people's bodies, boiling them from the inside out, which he demonstrates on the corpse of Joseph's ally in an effective example of the series' memorable gore:
That's the moment of the prevalent nastiness that Araki brings to this series. There's also this gross attack, in which Esidisi shoots his veins out of his fingernails:
Jojo eventually manages to defeat Esidisi in a spectacularly gory fashion, but it turns out that he had stolen the red gem that he and his pals were looking for, which in a lucky coincidence, Lisa Lisa had in her possession the whole time. So the gang heads off to intercept the gem, which they learned had been sent to a town in Switzerland, and when they get there, they face off against Kars, who we learn has the ability to extrude blades from his limbs in a fashion that puts Wolverine to shame:
However, he meets his match when he runs into the Nazi officer Stroheim, who seemed to have been dismembered and killed during Jojo's fight with Santviento in Mexico. But he's back, and he's been turned into a cyborg through superior Nazi technology!
After they recover the gem and fight off Kars, who escapes to menace them another day, Jojo and company decide to go after the bad guys, who appear to be hiding in an abandoned castle. We learn a bit about Caesar's tragic backstory, and then he has an epic battle with Wamuu, in which he demonstrates a new technique in which he turns his soap bubbles into deadly blades:
And then he dies heroically, while managing to recover the antidote to the poison that Jojo has been infected with, and Jojo and Lisa Lisa mourn for their fallen ally in a typically over the top manner:
And that's pretty much it for these two volumes. I believe the next installment will be the final volume in part 2 of the series, so we should get some especially epic battles to finish things off, hopefully leading to anticipation of more craziness to come in part 3 of the series.
So, what have we learned after all of this? This certainly isn't great literature, and it often comes off as incompetent and haphazard, but there's a definite charm to it. Shonen manga like this that involve drawn-out battles follow a very particular formula, with characters constantly coming up with new, crazy techniques and innovative uses of their powers, often delivering long monologues about what they and their opponents are doing in the split seconds that take place while punches are being thrown, leading to lengthy battles and attacks that take multiple pages to play out. There's an emphasis on strategy, with characters regularly revealing that they have anticipated the other's attack and preemptively countered it, only to have their own strategy undone by the other guy's anticipation of their anticipation. It's crazy and complicated, and Araki is great at coming up with surprising ways to have his heroes prevail against what seem like impossible odds.
So yes, the series delivers the pleasures that so many shonen manga provide, but I can't emphasize enough how utterly weird Araki's sensibilities are. Whether he's clothing his characters in strange fashions, contorting them into bizarre poses, or destroying their bodies in ever more grotesque displays of viscera, you never know what you're going to see upon the next page turn. I'm fascinated by this series, and I can't get enough of its strangeness. I can't wait to read more, and I hope to be surprised, grossed out, and amused for many volumes to come.
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