Jerusalem: When can I make a pilgrimage to this new holy land?

Jerusalem
By Alan Moore
Published by W.W. Norton



Alan Moore is a weird dude, but he's been writing compelling, fascinating stuff for decades now. Most of his body of work has been comics, but his first novel (or was it a collection of interlinked short stories?), Voice of the Fire, was pretty successful, so he apparently decided to go for broke and pour as many ideas as possible into his next work, and Jerusalem is the result, a 1,200-page doorstop of a book that is in turns mindbending, frustrating, and exciting in its sprawl of concepts and styles.

Like Voice of the Fire before it, Jerusalem centers on Moore's hometown of Northampton, England (specifically the working-class neighborhood known as The Boroughs), which he posits as centrally important in the history of Britain, a wellspring for much of Western culture, but a neglected and downtrodden place that is constantly being shat upon and systematically destroyed, possibly leading to the eventual downfall of civilization.

That's a pretty big idea to take in, but it's only one of the crazy concepts that Moore explicates here. While the story jumps around in time, with segments ranging from over 1,000 years ago all the way to the end of the universe (and also beyond time itself into higher dimensions), the story centers around a family native to the area, the Vernalls, and their fitful awakening to the role they play in the relationship between "our world" and the higher realms of the afterlife and the ghosts and spirits that inhabit it. It's an interesting multi-generational story, with everything leading to a climax of a sort, although now that I've finished, I'm still pondering exactly what to make of it all.

The journey from the beginning of the book to the end is definitely worth taking though. It starts with a prologue about Alma and Michael Warren, a brother and sister who grew up in the Boroughs in the 1950s and 60s. The defining incident around which much of the book is built has to do with a day in 1959 in which Michael, at three years old, choked on a cough drop and spent nearly ten minutes in which he was basically dead before being miraculously revived, with no memory of what happened during that time. But nearly 50 years later, in 2006, he has an accident and the memory of those 10 minutes comes flooding back, and it's so crazy that he thinks he might be going insane. He tells the story to his sister, who grew up to be a somewhat famous artist, and she decides to create an exhibition of works about his experiences, one that she says will make everything right that has gone wrong in their dying neighborhood.

But, having defined these two events that are of fundamental import to the story (Michael's near-death experience and Alma's exhibition), Moore proceeds to make us wait before he gets to them. Jerusalem is divided into three "books", and the first one skips around all over the place, focusing mostly (but definitely not exclusively) on members of Alma and Michael's family from earlier generations and their propensity for what seems like madness but turns out to be a knowledge of higher dimensions. This exhibits itself in different ways and to different effects, but it probably comes across most strikingly in a chapter told from the viewpoint of their great-grandfather Snowy Vernall, whose fourth-dimensional experience of his life means that he knows everything that will happen beforehand and simply follows predefined steps with his every action. Fascinatingly, Moore turns this into a beautiful examination of how this type of life would be experienced, describing how he still feels all of his emotions and lives every moment, even though he knows what's coming, and it ends up being a beautiful look at human life as lived without the illusion of free will.

There's plenty of other excellent drama and ideas in this first third of the book, with the perspective shifting in every chapter and jumping around in time to follow not only other members of the Vernall/Warren clan, but other characters as well, including a modern-day Boroughs prostitute, a former slave who emigrated from the United States, a medieval monk who hauled a stone cross from Jerusalem to mark Northampton as the center of England, and a ghost who roams the Boroughs living a strange sort of purgatorial existence.

That last one is one of the more interesting chapters, since it offers a hint at the weird cosmology that Moore has devised here, in which the departed can roam their former haunts and tunnel backward and forward in time, gaining sustenance from a sort of extradimensional fungus that looks like a bunch of conjoined fairies (you can see a depiction of these "Puck's Hats" right next to the title on the book's cover art, which was drawn by Moore). And when Moore finally comes back around to what happened during young Michael's near-death experience, you understand that he has been laying the groundwork for Book Two, which functions as an extended trip through the afterlife, a higher dimension known as Mansoul.

Book Two functions as one of the travelogues that Moore is famous for (think of William Gull's tour of London in From Hell, or, perhaps more analogous to this book, Promethea's journey through the Immateria), with Michael taking a premature trip through the afterlife, which sort of sits "above" our world and functions as a place where the dead can congregate, interact with angelic "Builders", and journey to any moment in history to witness what took place. This leads to plenty of adventures, many of which occur after Michael joins up with a group of apparent children (we learn that the dead tend to take the form at which they were happiest during their life) called the Dead Dead Gang, and they take him exploring through various moments in history, interesting areas of Mansoul, and sights that he needs to see to be able to later relate them to Alma so she can turn them into her art exhibition.

This second third of the book is probably where it works best, since it functions as a rollicking adventure through time and space, shifting perspectives each chapter so that we not only experience Mansoul through Michael's eyes, but also check in with each member of the Dead Dead Gang and learn about their lives and what led them to take part in these momentous events. There's an exciting scene in which they watch a fight between two Builders who come to blows over Michael's fate, an encounter with a demon whose nefarious schemes may or may not all be part of the grand plan, moments of profound sadness and joy, and a grand finale that's a fitting send-off to the kid before he rejoins his natural lifespan.

Following that tour de force exploration of the workings of the crazy afterlife that Moore has come up with, the last third of the book can't help but feel somewhat less satisfying, with much of it seeming like it's killing time before we can finally get to Alma's big exhibition and the culmination of all the book's plots. But there are still some fascinating ideas and continuing exploration of this world, including a trip to the end of the universe, a look at the world's monetary system (another thing that Moore claims has its origins in Northampton), and the payoff to some plots that had been simmering throughout the entire story.

Book Three also gives Moore a chance to experiment and push the limits of his format, sometimes in ways that test readers' patience. This is especially true in a chapter about James Joyce's daughter Lucia, who spent several decades in a Northampton mental hospital. Moore writes the chapter in what seems to be a pastiche of Joyce's style (I haven't actually read any Joyce, so I can't say how effective of an imitation it is), and it's a chore to get through. Everything is written phonetically and with lots of misspellings, rearranged words, and malapropisms, and reading it kind of drove me crazy, since it required constant decoding to determine what it was saying. I did get the hang of it after a while, but I was certainly glad when it was over, even though the content of the chapter lurking under the stylistic presentation was really interesting, with Lucia's fractured mental state allowing her to traverse multiple time periods and interact with lots of fantastical people and creatures.

Moore also throws in a few other semi-experimental bits, including a chapter that's presented as a sort of stage play (with Samuel Beckett, Thomas Becket, John Bunyan, and John Clare as characters), another that takes a stream-of-consciousness journey through one peripheral character's evening, and a third that takes the form of a poem (with an ABCCBA rhyme scheme that seems to reflect the book's structure itself). It's all rather playful, and by the time the book is over, it makes for a kaleidoscopic range of stories and ideas.

I'm still processing what exactly Moore is trying to say with all of this, but one thing I'm thinking is that Alma Warren is sort of a stand in for Moore himself (her name even sort of functions as a verbal anagram of Alan Moore), and this book is his version of her art exhibition, with the purpose of capturing the history and character of his beloved hometown and preserving its importance even as it (and, by extension, the rest of the world) decays into ruin.

But the book is really about so much more than just the importance of Northampton. It's full of fascinating ideas, and its extreme length lets Moore take side trips into whatever seems interesting, including Oliver Cromwell's psychological makeup; the struggle to come to terms with the fact that John Newton, writer of the song Amazing Grace, was also a slave trader; and even a look at cartoonist Ogden Whitney and his creation Herbie Popnecker. The book contains multitudes, and I'm sure it's full of additional secrets and symbols that I didn't catch. It's a pretty incredible experience, one that's like nothing else I've read, even among Moore's extensive, challenging body of work. It definitely requires an investment in time and mental energy, but it's totally worth 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.

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Things get more bizarre, believe it or not

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Part 1: Phantom Blood, Volume 3
By Hirohiko Araki
Published by Viz Media



Man, oh man, the first two volumes of this series were crazy, and I kind of loved them, but if anything, things get even nuttier here in this final volume of the first part of the series. When we left off, Jonathan Joestar and his compatriots were in pursuit of the evil vampire Dio, but they had to stop to fight some medieval knights that Dio had resurrected as zombies. We get the rest of their fight here, and it's full of goofy moments, including a breathlessly narrated revelation of the knights' awesomeness:




First, Jonathan battles Blueford, starting out by fighting him underwater (where he can't use his Hamon breathing powers) and then facing off against his crazy prehensile hair:



He ends up defeating him by punching him so hard that it destroys not only his body, but also the evil in his soul (or something like that):



Then, it's time to fight Tarukus, who Araki draws as a massive giant towering twice as tall as the rest of the characters, with a chest that's as wide as a car and an armored breastplate that makes it look like his abs come in a 16-pack. He's nastier than his compatriot, which he demonstrates by picking up some random guys and squeezing them like fruit so he can drink their blood:





JoJo ends up fighting him in some sort of medieval contraption in which they both have unbreakable collars locked around their necks, which are then attached to a chain that connects them through holes in the ceiling. It's weird and complicated, and at one point JoJo gets his neck broken but still recovers enough to do this:



Did I mention the prevalent gore in this series? It's totally nasty/awesome, which is as good a descriptor of this manga as any. This gets demonstrated again in a scene in which Dio is turning some villagepeople into zombies, and a woman begs him to spare her baby, so he promises that neither he nor any of his followers will harm the baby. But! When he turns her into a zombie, this happens:




Yes, this manga has a scene in which somebody eats a baby. Holy crap!

So anyway, Jonathan and his pals (which include some more Hamon masters who showed up from Tibet) eventually confront Dio, and all sorts of wackiness happens during the fight. At one point, they get attacked by a guy who had a bunch of snakes coming out of his head, and this happens:



Dio is crazy powerful, so nothing seems to hurt him, This gets demonstrated when JoJo manages to mostly bisect him with a sword, and it barely seems to slow him down:



But the good guys win of course, both through overwhelming virtue and also the support of their allies (there are two separate moments in this volume in which one of Jonathan's pals gets dismembered but manages to provide one last bit of support before dying). However what appears to be Dio's final defeat occurs about 70 pages before the book actually finishes, so you know he's going to somehow survive for another battle. And sure enough, we learn that he managed to cut his own head off before JoJo's Hamon energy completely destroyed him, and one of his minions absconded with his remains so he could menace JoJo another day.

Thinking he's found a happy ending, Jonathan gets married and heads off to America on a honeymoon. But Dio has managed to sneak his head onto the ship, and he's decided to take over JoJo's body and spread his vampire evil in the New World! Oh no! But don't worry, the first part of the series is almost over, so Jonathan manages to sacrifice his life to stop Dio, leaving his pregnant wife as the only survivor. Which leads us to...

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Part 2: Battle Tendency, Volume 1
By Hirohiko Araki
Published by Viz Media



The second part of the series picks up 50 years later in 1938, with the hero this time around being Jonathan's grandson, Joseph Joestar. This JoJo is kind of different; he's more of a troublemaker, and he's got a temper and a snarky attitude, often getting in confrontations with people, making them angry, and then predicting what they'll say to him in response:



He was born with the ability to use Hamon powers, so he's already pretty awesome when the story starts, and he'll presumably learn even more amazing powers in his continuing adventures. These start happening when Speedwagon, who in the gap between part 1 and 2 has become a rich oil magnate, discovers a weird underground temple in Mexico that contains more of the stone masks that turned Dio evil, as well as a weird pillar in which a humanoid, possibly alien figure seems to be in stasis. Could this be the source of the evil masks? Is it an example of humanity's ultimate evolution? Probably!

Since this is 1938, Araki gets the chance to use Nazis as some secondary villains, with them capturing Speedwagon and transporting the pillar man to their base in Mexico (sure, Nazis hung out there sometimes, right?). But before Joseph gets a chance to confront them, he has to fight Straizo, one of Jonathan's allies from the end of part 1, who decided to use the power of the masks in the temple in Mexico to gain immortality and attack Joseph in New York. This leads to a pretty crazy fight, which begins with JoJo introducing Straizo to his little friend:




After JoJo wins, he heads down to Mexico on a motorcycle, giving Araki a chance to put him in cool-guy poses and show off his bizarre take on human anatomy:



There's an amusing fight involving a Nazi assassin and a cactus, and Joseph tries to sneak into the Nazi compound by donning a rather unconvincing disguise:



Amusingly, this doesn't work in the slightest, so we're spared any scenes of gay panic in which Nazis hit on him and get grossed out when they find out he's a man.

And then things get crazy again, when we learn that the pillar man, who the Nazi commander has decided to name Santviento, is a super-powerful vampire type who can quickly learn modern language, contort his body to fit through tiny vents or wear people's bodies like a skin, and somehow feed off people by consuming them with his entire body. This leads to all sorts of nastiness as he destroys pretty much everyone in the base, and plenty of crazy stuff when JoJo fights him:



 

But since this is only the first volume in this part of the series, Santviento ends up being something of a minor, easily defeated threat. JoJo does manage to beat him in a pretty awesome fashion by using his weakness against sunlight, but then he learns that this pillar man is only one of several from around the world, and they'll be waking up and attacking humanity soon. Join us next time for more crazy nonsense!

So that's where we stand at this point of the series, which has since gone on for dozens of volumes that presumably get ever nuttier as they go on. I'm fascinated to read more, since there's no predicting what sort of nonsense Araki will come up with next. Some of what he does is par for the course for shonen manga, with characters coming up with new uses for their powers and shouting out the names of their attacks, but Araki seems particularly inspired, having JoJo do things like use Hamon to shatter his motorcycle goggles and send the shards of glass flying at bad guys, or having the evil Straizo decide the name for his eye-beam attack is "Space Ripper Stingy Eyes!" Combining this with his bizarre grasp of anatomy and fashion, Araki is sure to keep the craziness flowing, and I'm excited to see how he'll break my brain the next time. Bring it on, JoJo!