JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: The series gets...less bizarre?

This blog isn't dead if I publish one or two blogs a year, right?

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Part 3: Stardust Crusaders, Volumes 1-6
By Hirohiko Araki
Published by Viz Media



If the first two parts of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure were ludicrously over the top examples of shonen fighting manga, this third volume seems to be the point at which creator Hirohiko Araki toned things down a bit and settled into a long-running quest storyline. They're still pretty weird, with lots of striking gore, strange fashions, and nonsensical superpowers, but not quite at the level of what he had exhibited previously. Maybe setting the story in the present day somehow made things more restrictive, as if there needed to be at least some semblance to reality?

Whatever the case, there's still plenty of crazy stuff here. This volume introduces us to a new series protagonist, who is Japanese this time around. He's the grandson of Part 2's Joseph Joestar, but his name, Jotaro Kujo, can still be shortened to JoJo, and he's something of a tough guy high school student. However, we get introduced to him when his mother sends for her father, Joseph, who is looking pretty spry and muscular for a guy in his sixties. She reports that Jotaro has been arrested and refuses to leave jail, and when she and Joseph visit him, he claims that he's being haunted by an evil spirit, whose powers get demonstrated in pretty awesome fashion:


 

This is kind of a clever way of introducing the series' latest twist on crazy superpowers. You see, certain people have such powerful life energy that it creates an apparition expressing their inner nature or something. Since these spirit figures stand next to them, they are known as "stands," which I suspect is a case of a Japanese creator using an English word that sounded cool to them but comes off as awkward in translation.

Anyway, only stand users can see each other's stands, and both Jotaro and Joseph have had their stands recently awakened due to the reappearance of an old enemy: Dio! That's right, the villain from part 1 has been awakened after somebody found his body on the bottom of the ocean, and what's worse is, his head (which, you may remember, was all that was left of him after a series of epic battles) is wearing the body of Jonathan, Joseph's grandfather!

So, Joseph and Jotaro set out to go confront Dio, who is currently in Egypt. They are accompanied by a stand-using pal of Joseph's named Mohammed Avdol, who I think is supposed to be African, although I don't know what's going on with his weird hairstyle (which seems to consist of two-inch dreadlocks and a rat-tail) and what are either facial tattoos or some sort of scarring, as well as what looks like a very heavy earring necklace:



They quickly pick up a few allies as well. First up is another Japanese teenager named Noriaki Kikyoin, who attacks Jotaro at school in a creepy fashion by using his stand like a puppeteer to take over the body of the sexy school nurse and make her do some nasty stuff to some other juvenile delinquents:


 
 

However, when Jojo defeats him by having his stand punch him a lot, he drags him back to Joseph and Avdol and learns that he was being controlled by a "flesh bud" inserted into his brain by Dio:



Gross! But after Jotaro removes the flesh bud via awesomeness, Kikyoin is eager to join the gang on their quest. However, they quickly learn that their journey to Egypt won't be so easy when another bad guy attacks their plane and causes them to crash. In order to avoid endangering innocent bystanders in future attacks (and to provide a reason for a road-trip narrative), they decide to take a more roundabout route, traveling by sea and land throughout southern Asia. They do manage to fill out their ranks a bit more after encountering a Frenchman named Jean Pierre Polnareff in Hong Kong. As with Kikyoin, he attacks them because he's being controlled by Dio, but his sense of honor fights through his evil programming as he accepts a noble death by fire at the hands of Avdol's flame-controlling stand, which makes them decide to spare his life and let him join the team.

So, it's a long, eventful journey that's full of geographical and cultural details that may or may not be based on actual research; there are lots of wacky culture-shock misunderstandings while the gang is traveling through India, and plenty of other nonsense, like this strange aside involving some ascetics sighted by the side of the road:



That might just be Araki inserting some of his general oddball sensibility into the story, which he does take the opportunity to do whenever he gets the chance, although if anything, he seems to have toned things down a bit. This turns out to be a fairly conventional shonen narrative involving a group of awesomely-powered pals (some of whom started out as bad guys) traveling together and occasionally fighting evil on their way to confront the ultimate villain. The sheer level of anything-can-happen strangeness is not as prevalent here as it was in previous volumes, with villains mostly being defeated after being overpowered (Jotaro's main attack seems to be a flurry of punches) or occasionally outsmarted through teamwork. It's kind of disappointing; there's not much of the one-upmanship that I enjoyed so much in previous parts, with combatants countering their opponents moves through secret techniques only to fall prey to counter-counter moves, which are countered themselves in increasingly awesome and unlikely ways.

But maybe that sort of storytelling isn't sustainable; if every encounter is more awesome than the last, you eventually reach a point in which you can't get any more awesome (although I could think of a few rebuttals to that idea, such as the Dragon Ball manga or the anime Gurren Lagann). For a longer-running series, shorter encounters with secondary bad guys makes for an easier hook, and maybe Araki can pull out all the stops when the gang finally gets to Dio himself. And who knows, after that the sky's the limit.

But for what actually does occur here, there's plenty of strangeness, imagination, and lots of the series' trademark gore. Also, Araki has given himself an interesting foundation to build the series on by basing everyone's stand on cards from the Tarot deck. They start out by pairing cards with a color; Avdol's stand is named Magician's Red, Joseph's is Hermit Purple, Kikyoin's is Hierophant Green, Jonathan's is Star Platinum, and so on. Later, Araki drops the colors and just names stands after the cards, so they encounter Emperor, Hanged Man, The Lovers, Justice, The High Priestess, etc. It sort of makes sense, at least early on, with Avdol, a fortune teller, remarking on what the different cards represent and how the stand users' powers fit that theme. But eventually it just seems to be an idea generation machine, with the names of cards giving Araki an excuse to draw whatever seems to fit the theme. And eventually, Araki runs out of Tarot cards, so when the gang gets to Egypt, they start encountering stands based on the Egyptian pantheon of gods (some lip service to consistency is paid when a character claims that Egypt is the origin of the Tarot, which is a notion that seems suspect).

And there are certainly some crazy/cool ideas here, as well as quite a few that don't make a whole lot of sense, but you just kind of have to accept them. Joseph's stand takes the form of thorny vines that come out of his hands, but he mostly uses them to interface with electronic or photographic equipment for remote viewing purposes (including karate chopping and smashing a Polaroid camera in order to generate a picture of Dio). Polnareff's Silver Chariot stand is an armor-wearing swordsman that moves so fast that Avdol's stand's flame powers are useless against him because "My stand can freely slice apart flames and separate them...creating gaps between pockets of air, guiding the fire." Uh...sure, that makes sense, I suppose.

And those are just the main characters. The villains consist of a motley assortment of freaks and weirdos, mostly recognizable by their grotesque appearances. There's a serial killer whose stand attacks people through reflections, a sadomasochistic creep whose stand seems to be inspired by the killer doll from the movie Trilogy of Terror, a womanizing cowboy with a gun stand that fires ghost bullets, a gross old lady who turns people into zombies/puppets after punching holes through their bodies, a guy who shrinks his stand down to microscopic size to attack people from inside their brains, and a baby stand user who attacks people through their dreams. And those are the fairly normal ones!

There are also quite a few instances when Araki sets up rules, only to break them as soon as possible. Characters state early on that only stand users can see each other's stands, but at one point, the gang gets shipwrecked and lost at sea, and they, the crew of their boat, and a girl who decided to tag along as a sometime-sidekick end up on what appears to be a drifting, deserted ship. But wouldn't you know it, the whole ship is a stand! The stand user, by the way, turns out to be an ape that does not appear to be based on anything actually found in the animal kingdom:



This phenomenon of "normal people" being able to see and interact with stands happens more than once, and it usually gets hand-waved away. There's another guy whose stand is an amorphous, shape-shifting blob which he uses to disguise himself as other people, and apparently his stand is able to take physical form because that was what the plot called for. Later, the crew fights against a stand that takes the form of a sword that possesses anyone who unsheathes it, which kind of upends the whole basis of the series' mythology. Ah well, you can't really take points off a series like this for being unrealistic.

One thing I did sort of take points off for, though, is Araki not coming up with as many crazy poses, strange anatomical irregularities, or weird costume choices. There are certainly some regrettable hairstyles, like Polnareff's super-high flattop/mullet combo (Araki sometimes gives him a hairline that makes it look like his head is cylindrical):



Or the wad of hair that seems to be hanging off the front or side of Kikyoin's head:



And I'm not sure what is going on with Jotaro's hat, which seems to either have his hair sticking up through the top or only covers the front of his head:



But other than that, people seem almost normal, with few expressionistic fashion flourishes (Polnareff's weird tube-top/one-shoulder tanktop is particularly goofy), and aside from an occasional bit of anatomical oddness, action poses that are fairly standard. Instead, Araki seems to be saving up his excessiveness for the ever-present gore. Blood flows in this series like few others, and villains are usually dispatched in incredibly nasty fashion. People's heads explode, limbs are severed, guys are stabbed full of holes or cut in half, and all manner of nastiness occurs. In one especially brutal moment, even a dog gets killed in gory fashion:



It's pretty horrific stuff, but it's certainly memorable. It also serves to make the good guys willingness to straight up murder their enemies somewhat more palatable, since the bad guys are likely to viciously dismember anyone and everyone they encounter. This usually makes their comeuppance pretty satisfying, whether they're getting stabbed to death by Polnareff:



Or pummeled by Jotaro:



So, overall, this is still a pretty enjoyable series, even if it has lost some of the batshit craziness of earlier volumes. I'm definitely curious to see what other types of superpowers and gore that Araki can come up with, and who knows, maybe he'll pull out some sort of insane battle that tops everything he's done so far. Here's hoping for as much nonsense and, yes, bizarreness as possible.

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Barreling bizarrely toward the present

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Part 2: Battle Tendency, Volume 4
By Hirohiko Araki
Published by Viz Media



So here's another volume of classic manga craziness, so, since this series has defeated my abilities to offer much in the way of cogent analysis, get ready for another recap of the madness contained within. Let's get started!

The previous volume ended with Jojo and his mentor Lisa Lisa about to confront the evil Wamuu and Kars following the heroic death of their ally Caesar. But they soon discover that the bad guys have created an army of vampires, including this guy:



But even though our heroes are outnumbered, they manage to bluff their way into a pair of one-on-one duels, since they still have the magical gem in their possession that will grant their foes untold power. They agree to meet at a nearby location called Skeleton's Heel, which is a Stonehenge-style stone circle (in Switzerland, because this series' grasp of history and geography is rather tenuous) that also doubled as a chariot-racing arena in Roman times.

In case you're wondering if that means what you think it means, here's what appears as soon as Jojo shows up for his scheduled fight:



Yep, that's right: it's time for a chariot race with vampire horses! That sounds pretty awesome, and it quickly turns into a classic shonen manga battle, with rules about weapons being deployed by being hung on pillars throughout the track. Jojo manages to get an early lead due to some trickery, but the early advantage he gains by obtaining a giant sledgehammer is quickly undone when Wamuu does this:






The fight soon turns into one of those affairs where each guy uses some awesome move against the other, only to find that his opponent has foreseen it and come up with a counterattack, but then the original guy has a counter-counterattack ready, and so on. We seem to reach a turning point when Jojo uses his Hamon super-breathing powers to basically rip Wamuu's arms off:



But Wamuu uses an awesomely dramatic technique to power through the pain:





Sure, why not? Blinding himself apparently also heal's Wamuu's wounds, and he extends a unicorn horn that he can use to sense vibrations, Daredevil style, and keep going. After more fighting involving super-powerful crossbows and meticulous ricochet skills, Jojo seems to have delivered a killing blow, but Wamuu doesn't go down easily:



Yep, even with his body disintegrating, he keeps attacking using awesomely weird moves, including a suicide maneuver in which he sucks large volumes of air into his lungs and shoots it out with a laser focus, threatening to decapitate Jojo. But Jojo manages to come up with a counter that basically explodes Wamuu's body, leaving only his head to finish off. Which Jojo does, in a surprisingly merciful fashion:





Yes, it's all about respect between warriors, that most classic of shonen manga tropes. The other vampires don't see it that way though, and they try to attack, giving Wamuu the chance to make one last awesome attack:




After all this nuttiness, it seems like there's almost no way for the big climactic battle with Kars, the leader of the Pillar Men, to top it, but it ends up being epicly dramatic, involving the revelation of the secret connection between Jojo and Lisa Lisa (spoiler: she's his long-lost mother), the last minute arrival of Nazi cyborg Stroheim to lend some help, Kars becoming the "ultimate being" and gaining the power of all life on earth, and one last final plan by Jojo that involves flying a plane into a volcano. It's pretty amazing stuff.

However, I've shared enough images, so more of my breathless "and then this happens" descriptions can only dull the brain-melting effects of experiencing this manga. Just know that it's crazy and awesome and full of so many bizarre things piling on top of each other that the only possible response is to just hang on for the ride.

Of Hirohiko Araki's various artistic tics, I was disappointed that there weren't very many chances for crazy outfits in this volume, although I did like Wamuu's battle garb, which consists of a bulging, jeweled loincloth, some sort of bicep guards, and a vest pinned to his chest with knives:



There's also this goofy chapter-opening illustration of Jojo wearing what appears to be four hats that have been loosely stitched together:



And I also caught several appearances of one of Araki's weirder anatomical impossibilities that he keeps returning to (I mentioned it all the way back in part 1, volume 1 of the series) in which a character gets hit so hard his legs seem to get shortened:



Note that that page also includes Araki's weird sense of scale, in which it's hard to tell how big characters are actually meant to be. Is Wamuu really supposed to be three times as tall as Jojo? Maybe it's just exaggeration, but it works to make the series feel strange and unearthly, the kind of story where literally anything can happen (and often does).

So, as of the end of this volume, the series seems to finally make its way to the present (that is, the late 80s), and part 3, Stardust Crusaders, kicks off with what is sure to be more awesomely nonsensical fighting. I can't wait to read it.

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Is it getting more bizarre? Maybe!

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Part 2: Battle Tendency, Volumes 2-3
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.