I
feel like a post about JoJo’s Bizarre adventure is an adequate tone-setter for
this blog.
For
those poor, poor fools living in ignorance, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is a manga
series by Hirohiko Araki, with a run spanning nearly thirty years. The story itself spans much longer, covering
the lineage of the Joestar family across generations as they fight poor
Italians, rich Italians, naked vampires named after 1980s bands, cats that somehow
turned into flowers, prison inmates that drink their own pee, and an ape on a
boat. “That sounds like a load of total
nonsense,” you’re probably saying. But I
know better. I’ve drunk enough of the
hot-pink, glittery kool-aid to believe that JoJo is probably the best “people
punching each other a lot” manga ever,
and I’m not even that crazy for thinking so! It actually does a lot of things
really well, even if you don’t count “hand-on-hips posing” as one of those
things! It does so many things well that
I can make a contrived list about how rad it is!
1.
Things
actually change
There’s a famous
joke about Dragon Ball Z, the prototypical “people punching each other a lot”
manga/anime franchise.
“How long does it
take for Goku to change a light bulb?”
“300 episodes.”
The problem is
especially present in Dragon Ball Z, where setting, characters, and
three-foot-tall hairstyles can remain basically the same for literally hundreds
of chapters, but it plagues the genre as a whole. Naruto, despite being about ninjas that can
summon giant frogs and birds and shit to travel around on, has been in the same
rock quarry since 2011. If only there
was some way to change things up after the same characters and settings got too
stale…
“Worry not,” JoJo says, sensually rubbing
oil on its muscular yet shapely calves, “I
know what to do! You just say ‘fuck it all’ every hundred chapters!”
Even more than
its shapely legs, this structure is JoJo’s most beautiful attribute. Stories have clear beginnings and endings,
and the characters and setting completely change regularly. But each new story,
or “part,” maintains the campy charm and fight scenes revolving around putting
things in somebody else’s mouth that are the soul of the JoJo series. Speaking of “terrible, terrible segues…”
2.
Stands
fucking rule
Don’t get me wrong;
the first two parts of JoJo are great. Jonathan Joestar is an excellent character to
introduce you to the series. His
struggle against his outrageously evil brother Dio Brando is entertaining, his
mentor Zeppeli has an amazing hat, and Jack the Ripper explodes out of a
horse. Part 2 is even better: the
vampires are even more gay and badass than before, Joseph Joestar is one of the
most entertaining characters in any manga
(he defeated the vampire Dire Straits by tying grenades to his jacket, only to
reveal that he tied even more grenades
to the inside of his jacket, whilst yelling “you need to learn more about
cities!” Then Dire Straits exploded) and
the 1930s setting is used pretty well, some weirdly prominent Nazi characters
aside. But JoJo really gets good after Part 3, when every character has an
invisible ghost-friend named after a band or a tarot card.
Called “stands” because they always “stand
by your side” (except for the ones without legs. Or the ones that are just natural disasters
or fog. Or the ones that are vehicles or
buildings. Or the ones that are a
horrible, corrosive mold that melts your flesh if you ever move to a lower
altitude from your present altitude, even if you only sit down after moving to
high ground, and yes, Green Day is an actual stand,) these ghost-thingies changed
fights from “I wonder how JoJo is going to kill that guy he’s looking at” to “I
wonder what the fuck is going to happen.” If you can think of something stupid and
crazy, it’s probably been a stand, and it’s probably been used in a fight. Spaghetti? Punch that shit, it looks
suspicious. It’s got tiny flavor stands
in it. A rat that can turn other rats
into fleshy cubes of jello, and needs to be sniped by throwing marbles at it at
incredibly high speeds? Fucking duh. Use a rebound marble on that shit. A stand that summons meteors to your
position, no matter where you are, and even if you move directly into their
path, the meteors will burn up just before they hit you? Use your stand’s
string-based powers to catch one of the meteors in a shoe; seal the shoe
closed, and let the meteor’s momentum carry the shoe into the stand user’s
face. In most manga, there are one or
two fights that surprise you, where you stop and re-read what just happened and
think to yourself “huh, that was pretty clever.” In JoJo, every
single fight is like that. In JoJo
Part 4, there’s a stand that’s just an Electrical Tower you can’t leave, and to
get out you have to punch the tower and re-direct the nails and screws and shit
it shoots back at you at the other guy, and that’s
not even one of the better fights in Part 4. Part 4 has a guy with an army of
one-inch-tall soldiers! It’s so beautiful!
3.
It’s
so beautiful
JoJo’s art style
combines the detailed, almost photorealistic style of Fist of the North Star
and the scene in the Ali G movie where Tywin Lannister is shaking his ass in a
skin-tight leather miniskirt. The JoJo
in Part 5, Giorno Giovanna, has a heart-shaped pec-window in his leather school
uniform, which, incidentally, is covered with giant ladybugs. The JoJo in Part 1 wears tight purple pants,
sleeveless shirt, gloves, and has brown leather thigh-highs. The JoJo in Part 2 is similar, except he has
a tank top, a scarf, and a bandanna.
Every character looks like they fell into a vat of glitter glue, and
before they could dry it off someone started throwing the 1970s and 1980s at
them and it was too fast for them to doge any of it.
And then they
start fighting each other, and it becomes clear that the author has very little
understanding about how the human anatomy works. This is exactly the correct amount of
understanding for a manga artist. Heads,
arms, lets, explode in geysers of blood because a meatball hit their pressure
points or something, and half the time people don’t even care. In Part 5, GioGio
loses his hand, but he just grabs some garbage form the ground, turns it into a hand by punching it, and sticks that
shit back on like a lego brick. People can
survive having their liver ripped out of them if you shove it back in within a
few minutes. You can still move your
arms if your shoulder is gone. You can
eat a bowl of spaghetti that literally makes your guts burst out, but they’ll
just recede back in and you’ll poop better for a few weeks. I want every page of JoJo painted on the side
of my van. I want a fleet of JoJo vans,
dazzling the world with their chiseled, glittery abs, and people’s heads caved
in by giant hooks.
4.
It’s
diverse in every sense of the word
Parts
1 and 2 of JoJo are martial-arts vampire stories. Part 3 is a ghost adventure spanning from
every country in between Egypt and Japan.
Part 4 is a ghost adventure mystery
action-comedy about fleshing out and developing one place, giving it new
landmarks like trapping a serial killer inside of a rock to suffer unceasing
torment. Part 5 is a mafia story. Part 6 is about survival in a maximum-security
prison in Florida where there’s no dress code and half the inmates are people
made of plankton or brainwashed with CDs that teach them how to bring taxidermied
crocodiles to life. Part 7 is a
cross-country race in turn-of-the-century America, and Part 8 is about a sailor
with purple lips and four testicles. A crucial plot point is finding a dead guy
with no testicles. JoJo looks at Netflix and its bizarrely
specific genres and laughs, before summoning a purple genie-man with a mullet
to punch them thousands of times in less than a second.
But JoJo isn’t just diverse in characters,
settings, themes, genres, and structure.
It’s also diverse in how many groups of people are represented. Part 3 has a middle-eastern guy with a badass
fire chicken. Part 6 not only has an
almost all-female cast, but writes them competently. They’re not “strong,” they’re smart, dumb,
cunning, polite, rude, savvy, inexperienced, loyal, shifty. They’re people. And they’re physically strong enough to smash
a human skull with a baseball-yo-yo.
There’s even a part in the beginning of Part 6 where Joleyne Kujoh (get
it? Jolene KuJoh? Not contrived at all?) arrives in prison, where she sees a
bunch of naked guys walking out of the prison sauna or whatever. When she finds out that they’re trans, she
just looks approvingly at their butts and remarks how awesome “the future” is. Stuff like that shouldn’t be a big deal, but
in the landscape of manga, that shit is jaw-dropping.
5.
There’s
one part in Part 4 where Josuke meets an alien with shape-shifting powers, and
he gets him to shape-shift into die that always rolls high so he can cheat
thousands of dollars out of a nearby manga artist in a game of chance. But the dice battle is tricky because the
alien gets motion-sick when he’s shaken around too much, so Josuke has to
balance his cheating with making sure his dice doesn’t throw up all over
everything.
Batman has eight
movies, and that arc in the manga has none.
Bullshit.
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