Angie explains: Jojo's Bizarre Adventure

If you ask an American fan what the biggest, most well-known and currently running manga are they will likely throw out the Big 3 shounen fighting hits: Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece. A Japanese fan would likely give out the same titles, but you'd probably hear Jojo in there as well. Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, by unaging vampire lord Hirohiko Araki, has been running continuously for 25 years. It both influences and is influenced by fashion, music, and pop culture. If you consume Japanese media you have doubtlessly seen multiple references to Jojo even if you don't know it.

So what is Jojo's Bizarre Adventure? It is a generational story. While a lot of the long running shounen battle manga are about a single central figure and their rotating support cast, there are 8 parts to Jojo, each about a different member of the Joestar family and their own distinct adventure with a beginning, middle and ending. The cast is not the only thing that changes from part to part either. One part is a globe-trotting battle adventure, another is a slice of life centered on a small town.

And like George R.R. Martin, Araki feels no hesitation in killing characters and making you cry.

If you follow me on tumblr, you probably know that Jojo has pretty much taken over my life recently. Here's a short summary of why:

Really likable characters with a huge variety of personalities. With as many characters as Araki creates it's important that they be distinct, and he handles this with grace. The following chart explains the vague outline of the types of characters Araki creates:



Incredible body horror. I won't link an image here, but Araki not only does terrible and weird things to bodies during fights, he draws it so beautifully.

Speaking of fights, Jojo is the thinking man's battle manga. While there is undoubtedly a lot of fighting, once you get past the first two parts there's more or less no such thing as a power-up or a training arc. You get people with distinct and esoteric powersets going up against each other in fights where cleverness and situational awareness are the key turning points of the battle. Rather than reflecting on revenge or friendship, a lot of battles are struggles to figure out just what the fuck someone is doing and what its limits are before they kill you.

I also like that Araki will never draw someone in normal clothes when he can make them over the top, and will never pose someone normally if he can make it fabulous. He actually has told cosplayers that there's no canon colors for anyone in his series because he loves to change them on a whim anyway, so they should use whatever color combination they want. He is also hugely inspired by western music and you will find characters and powers named after bands like ACDC, King Crimson, and Foo Fighters. In fact, one of the big reasons Jojo doesn't come to the states is that Araki doesn't want to change the names of his characters and Prince has threatened to sue if it comes out here.

And the final reason I love Jojo: the manly tears.



I have pretty intense feelings for a lot of these characters, Araki is good at making flawed but endearing protagonists who sneak up on you and take over your emotions.





And of course I have to post this.




I will probably make a post in this thread about every part of the manga, elaborating on what they are about. There's 3 distinct jumping-on points for the manga and we'll go over why you can start there and what you'll be missing if you don't start from the beginning.

In the thread announcing the creation of this forum, I said that Jojo was a cultural phenomenon spanning multiple forms of media and I wasn't kidding. In addition to this massive, sprawling manga there's also an older fighting game, as well as an upcoming video game. There's two old sets of OVAs, and a currently airing anime (THAT HAS ROUNDABOUT BY YES FOR THE END THEME). There was recently a museum exhibit devoted to Araki for the 25th anniversary of Jojo, and that exhibit is now in the process of moving to Italy.

If all this sounds good and you are ready to jump on board, another thoughtful Jojo fan has put together this amazing resource on how to get started!

Feel free to ask questions and state your own reasons for liking Jojo, btw.

Also, real life true fact: Adree likes Jojo.

I like it but reading manga is a fucking chore at best.

Is it available in English-style book format (e.g. reading front-to-back) or has it only been translated in the Japanese back-to-front format?

It's only in the Japanese format. It turns out that artists really hate it when you flip their art, and the people who generally read this stuff are accustomed to reading it Japanese-style by now.

Boo. Oh well.

I've been interested in this since hearing about the game years ago, but it's pretty daunting. If I were to start reading it would it be best to just start at the beginning or is there a particular arc somewhere else that's better/more accessible?

Start at the beginning. BE A MAN

My official recommendation is to start at the beginning. I'll go into more detail about it in later posts, but even though the art is rougher and the pacing is hilariously all over the place and the powers have not evolved into what has made the manga famous, it's totally worthwhile to get the context of what happens in the first two parts. Plus Speedwagon is in the first two parts, you don't want to miss Robert E. O. Speedwagon.

They are short, and you will enjoy them.

There are two other jumping on points. Part 3 is where we get to the iconic powers that made Jojo as famous as it becomes and it does a kinda decent job of explaining the context of the first two parts. Part 7 was explicitly written to be a new jumping-on point as Jojo changed which monthly magazine it was published in. For spoilery reasons, you don't need the context of what came before, but there's a billion callbacks that make part 7 a richer experience if you have read the whole thing.

Generally speaking if someone reads 7 they are gonna go back and read the rest and then read 7 again, though, so I don't mind recommending people start there. Plus it has my favorite Jojo. If someone starts at 3, they aren't quite as likely to go back and hit 1 and 2, though.

Just gonna go ahead and embed these because

want

The thing to know about this game is that pretty much every movement and pose you see is taken directly from a manga panel.

25 years?! Holy shit, that's long.

And which is the part with Jolyne? She's my favourite from your tumblr Jojospam posts. Is she in the same part as the dinosaur dude?

Jolyne is the Jojo from part 6, Stone Ocean, while precious dinosaur Diego is from Part 7, Steel Ball Run. But my love of Jolyne and her posse of badass prison babes runs deep.

Ack, you didn't tell me each one takes place in a totally different time, Black Adder-style. Ok, I'm in.

There is a character named REO SPEEDWAGON.

Goddammit I do not need to go looking into this.

Is... is he narrating his own panel?

Speedwagon specializes in narration. No one narrates better.

Up until I started watching the new series this was literally the only thing I knew about Jojo's.

PART 1: PHANTOM BLOOD

This part is the oldest and it shows it both in the art and the pacing. Visually, Phantom Blood is heavily inspired by First of the North Star and 80s western action movie stars. What you get is a whole lot of muscle and anatomy that doesn't quite look right. Add in Araki's preference for over the top posing and fashion and things can get really, really weird.

But this is where it all begins, with precious gentleman Jonathan Joestar and his vile and stylish nemesis Dio Brando. Yes, both names are music references, Jojo for Get Back, and Dio for DIO obviously. While the battles are somewhat clever, there's still a training arc and power-ups and Jonathan just kind of makes things up as he goes.

The story is set in the late 1800s in London.

Most of what you will get from starting at Phantom Blood:

• A lot of laughs, both intentional and not
• The foundation of the Joestar bloodline and the beginning of themes that will occur again later
• The introduction of Dio, the world's biggest asshole
• An unespected british history lesson
• A primer in why you shouldn't get attached to animals in Jojo
• SPEEDWAGON
• ZEPPELI
• ERINAAAAAAAAAA

It's only about 5 volumes long and it will make you do this a lot


Edit for the animated version:




This is also the part that is currently being animated, though it will be finished this Friday and they will be moving on to the next part.

So... I read this right to left, but still top to bottom, yeah?

So many things now make (a little) more sense!

Man up.

Cdisplay also has a manga mode, which lets you scroll normally, two pages at a time, and you just read right to left. That's the way you should be reading anyway, since it lets you load up an entire .rar at once and it displays in order.

Yes.

Oh, I know how it works. It's just like driving a right hand drive car. I can do it, it's just not what I'm most comfortable with.

Worth it! Utterly worth it, I assure you. I was slow to get into Jojo, but the first volume started to grab me midway, and I started to fall for it hard in the second, and I'm a god damn junkie by the third.

But really I fully endorse Cdisplay. Freeware, best comic book reader around to me.

AS EXPECTED, I WAS USELESS

SPEED WAGON WITHDRAWS COOLLY

Poetry

Yes, the anime was hysterical with everybody shouting EVERYTHING, even in their thoughts, even when they whisper, they shout because they are so filled with manly pride and passion. My brother watches it, and I can always tell when he does because he's trying to out-shout the characters with long rows of "WHAT" and "AWESOME!" and "FABOLOUS!"

Mere moments in to reading this (thanks to this thread) I have already decided it may be written by a psychopath:



EDIT: and later....

Well, that last one actually makes a lot of sense since Les Misérables became popular in Japan the same time it did in Europe because the Meiji administration was looking to Europe, and France and Prussia in particular on how to model society, so if you take it as an accurate representation of Victorian England as WELL as France, which is probably not a very good idea in the first place, the teeth selling makes some slight sense.

EDIT: And then I talk myself down from 'a lot of sense' to 'slight' by the end. Typing while waking up: An Experience.

Right, so I'm still reading this and so far Phantom Blood is moderately normal for japanese manga anime, right up until the part when you see:

From there it appears to be a long train ride through crazy town.

EDIT: because why not, a random out of context frame:

PART 2: BATTLE TENDENCY

Here we skip forward to the 1930s and Jonathan's grandson, Joseph Joestar. While Jonathan is a kind and driven gentleman, Joseph is clever, rude, and lazy. This part also shows its age, and the posing and fashion gets more out of control than in Part 1 because of Araki breaking free of the Fist of the North Star influence and finding his own groove. This part gives us a huge amount of music references too, from the divine and badass Lisa Lisa, to villains like ACDC, Wham, and Cars.

This is the part where Araki started experimenting with the idea of having fights be based more on cleverness than straight up power. It still includes a training arc, and people do still whip new powers out of their ass on occasion, but you can see that he's moving in the direction of having more cerebral battles. Oh yeah, and there's Nazis. Fighting game fans will recognize the design of Stroheim, he influenced the creation of multiple characters.

Things you will get out of reading Battle Tendency:

• A great understanding of who Joseph is, which is important in multiple upcoming parts
• The tradition of punching people until they become friends begins
• If the villains in this part don't make you uncomfortable with their near nudity, glamorous posing, and body horror then nothing the series throws at you will creep you out too much
• Tequila Joseph kawaii~
• Reasons to never get on an aircraft with Joseph
• Lisa Lisa is our first woman to get into combat and she's a stonecold badass.

• "Depending on how you answer, I may have to kick your ass!"
• Grandma Erina

Yeah, look at Grandma Erina sparkle.
Battle Tendency is a lot funnier than Phantom Blood, but the pacing is still erratic and it's still a pretty short part. Still totally worth reading.

Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase 'Silent But Deadly'.

Up until now I just read the first two arcs of the manga and part of the third. I think the story really gets better in the third arc, and the stands are fabolous!

For some reason I thought Jojo was a different sort of manga entirely.

I'm so in.

Looking pretty Gendo thar, Grandma Irina.

I read a bit of the first chapter or two but I got tired of the nobility and animal cruelty. Dead pets for the sake of angst is like my number-one turnoff.

...How long does it take for that to stop happening?

Alas, poor Danny. If you've made it past that, then you are in good shape. Things do happen to animals sometimes. Sometimes they are pets, or characters in their own right with internal monologues. It's not something that happens constantly, Dio is just a huge dick. There's one other scene in Part 1 that might bother you, but it's not at all like the Danny situation where someone's pet is being harmed for emotional angst. The scene is a total wtf for everyone.

(And I can't imagine anyone being offended by Dio's amazing pets)

Well violence towards animals pretty much doesn't stop from happening in part 1 one in particular shown and some assumed from the general level of destruction, but that's more a function of the extreme level of gory violence that predominates throughout.

As to pets specifically, I can't speak to the parts beyond the first but other than the one you've already seen any future massacred animals in part 1 fit more in the category of background extras than main players/pets. Angie has hinted that the future parts perhaps contain more of that kind of thing so if its that much of a trigger I wouldn't continue.

Other things you should avoid:

EDIT: Damn you Angie :)