Entering JoJo’s Weird World

As a kid, I always identified heavily with the word "weird". I was always told that I was a "weird" kid. I liked monsters, Halloween, odd toys like The Incredible Crash Dummies, and magicians. I read books about Sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, and aliens from the library. I liked learning and going to school. I cared about the environment and wanted to include others in events and games fairly and equally. These are all still true things about me.

Sometime in the year 2000, I first heard the name JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. "Bizarre" is of course often a synonym for "weird", and, even to a weird kid like me, this was such a weird name that I was intrigued. From what I remember, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure was first introduced to me as a video game for PlayStation that my friend Augustin had rented. I heard all about the colorful designs of the manga-based fighting game. This was a story that had not yet been introduced to a major audience in North America. Of course, this wasn't unusual for that time, a time when anime was still getting a major foothold here in the wake of Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, and Pokémon after earlier attempts with Robotech and Speed Racer. There were people in the know, older teens who subscribed to magazines and went to conventions and maybe even talked on the early internet about Gunsmith Cats and Ninja Scroll, but I was just a kid. I was excited to learn more about JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, imagining carnivals and harlequins in Todd McFarlane's style. It took around 15 years for me to get ahold of it.

I never actually got to play the game. I own it now, but I still have not played it. Back then, I just missed out of my friend's short rental time and never seeing the game at the store. Now it's because I didn't know enough of the story to feel comfortable playing the game. See, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is divided into eight parts (at least so far). Each part is basically a different story with a different main character, but for the first six parts (the last two take place in an alternate timeline), the characters are all related to each other, usually children or grandchildren of a previous character. They are all members of the Joestar family, descended from Jonathan Joestar from the first story.

Part 1, Phantom Blood, tells the story of two boys who grow as siblings, rivals, and, eventually, enemies. It is a Victorian horror tale of vampirism and supernatural martial arts with the shadow of Go Nagai's Devilman between the two fighters. The second part, Battle Tendency, continues the story through the first hero's grandson as he discovers the legacy of the vampirism and grows in his own martial arts skills through battles against ancient warriors and Nazis. Both feature graphic gore and references to musicians.

Neither of these first two story arcs are particularly long, though Phantom Blood is a more concise story and less grandiose than Battle Tendency. The second part, along with its influence of pulp horror comics, also takes on a more typical shonen fighting storyline, though the first part is not far off either. The best comparison might be the episodes of Yu Yu Hakusho before Yusuke enters the Dark Tournament or Dragon Ball Z before the heroes head to the planet Namek. There are still plotted fight scenes with elements of expository narration, but it's not the same kind of drawn-out stuff as Frieza and Goku's final battle in the Dragon Ball Z anime. Part 2 never gets to Super Saiyan stalemates either, but it definitely shows a power increase.

So far, I have only read these two parts. The game is based around the next part, Stardust Crusaders, and that part is longer than the first two combined. It also introduces something called Stands that I don't know much about. From what I understand, the Stands take over from the Hamon wave energy of the first two parts as the new style of magical martial arts. The series also gets aesthetically less and less similar to Fist of the North Star as it goes along, the big change apparently starting in the fourth part, Diamond Is Unbreakable. I'll get there as I keep going along, just like the Joestars themselves. I will always be a weird kid. How about you?

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