I’ve decided it would be a good public service to make short overviews and recommendations of mangas, comics, movies, novels, and art I have encountered and believe are worth a look (actually, it helps me keep track of what I’ve read). My tastes are pretty wide, but seeing this is a recommendation page, I will be leaning towards titles most people may never have heard of. This first one, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, will probably be familiar only to “hardcore” shonen manga fans – it’s certainly off the beaten track.

 

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (Hirohiko Araki)
Shonen Jump, over 75 volumes? (1987 ~ present?)

Bizarre doesn’t begin to describe this, and I’m just talking about the art. If you’re into pages and pages of magical warriors duking it out in gruesome, bloody and surprisingly innovative battles, then this grotesquely drawn manga will be your cup of tea (if you can get over how weird it looks). Mind you, this falls squarely into the “Shonen Fighting” genre, and if you hate the idea of muscular macho-men, minimal character development and over-the-top combat in the first place, you won’t like this at all no matter how innovative it is.

 

Plot
As for the plot, what plot? Nobody ever reads stuff like this for the plot. Loosely speaking, the series is divided into 6 sections, mostly detailing the adventures of the Joestar family; JOnathan JOestar, JOseph JOestar, JOtaro KuJO, JOsuke Higashikata, GIOrno GIOrvanna, and JOsephine KuJO. I believe the THIRD section, involving Jotaro Kujo, is the best in the series, though I really liked the innovative combat in the fourth section. You can skip the first 2 sections, because knowledge of it isn’t necesssary to understand the rest of the series.

 

Why I recommmend this
The innovation of the combat system, ofcourse. That’s the only reason why anyone ever reads JoJo. This may be a typical shonen-fight manga, but unlike most fighting manga, the dueling is often surprisingly cerebral. That is because the fighters don’t rely on ki-blasts or complex martial arts manouevers, but on the use of stands, which is like a magical alter-ego of yourself. Each stand has it’s own unique abilities, strengths, weaknesses, limitations and method of use. Battles often rely on finding the abilities, strengths and weaknesses of the enemy’s stand, leading to a tactical struggle where both sides race to eliminate the opponents. And the abilities of the stands can often be very, very strange – and sometimes entirely non-physical. The flexibility in which the users use their stands, and how the heroes figure out the ability of the enemy’s stand can be rivetting and at times brilliant.

“JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” is a remedy to a genre inhabited by tired cliches, where villains and heroes explain their special attacks in excruciating detail, and fights are won by pounding the other side into dust. Luckily, no villain in JoJo is dumb enough to explain their stand the the enemy. Finding where the villain is hiding while avoiding the enemy’s stand is one of the highlights of the combat. Nobody stands around offering blow-by-blow commentary as their friends are being gutted either, which is another antidote to the one-on-one fighting in so many manga when five-on-one will get the job done much faster. JoJo also eschews the Pokemon mind-set where stands battle each other – the stands directly attack the users, which is the smart thing to do since the users themselves are the most vulnerable part of their stands.

All-in-all, a fighting manga with a brain, which is rarer than you’ll think in this genre.