Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure 23

So, as you may remember, we celebrate a very serious holiday on June 7th here at Slightly Biased Manga.  That holiday is Hirohiko Araki’s birthday.  All employees are given a paid day off.  All employees being me.  And I actually had to work today.  And it’s also my birthday, which is the actual reason I bother to remember this.  But all the same, it is a solemn day for appreciating what is quite possibly the best comic series EVER.

I’m quite glad this volume got published at all.  It’s the only one that’s come out this year, though it looks like the problems with the series have been cleared up and a quarterly release schedule is resuming.  That’s reason enough to celebrate even without the birthday.  You may remember there was some sort of dance party last year.  This year I’m doing something a little different, but all the same, I’m putting on a record and getting groovy anyway.  Give me a minute to get the rest of it ready.

So, what happens in this volume?  The world’s most epic game of poker.  The new stand user, D’Arby, is all about gambling, and his stand’s power has the ability to steal your soul when you put it up for a bet.  He turns souls into poker chips and files them away in an album.

D’Arby is an expert gambler, and also a fair hand at cheating.  He cheats twice under the nose of Star Platinum, and finally Jojo decides he needs to beat him at his own game.  I like the parts where Jojo takes on the stand user, because Jojo’s role consists of being as much of a stoic badass as possible.  He delivers.  Hard.  When he runs out of souls to bet, he bets other people’s souls.  People who aren’t even there.  People like… poor Holly.  That wager, and the reaction to it, was the highlight of the volume for me.

Also, rarely is Star Platinum, Jojo’s stand, used how it was intended (it is the strongest, fastest, and most unbeatable stand).  That tells you this isn’t quite a regular tournament manga, because usually the other stand users would be overpowering it on a regular basis.  They don’t, because Star Platinum is stronger than any other stand.  They use different methods to challenge the main characters, with hilarious results.  Star Platinum does get a brief chance to shine here.  He rushes out and breaks D’Arby’s fingers when D’Arby tries to cheat while dealing at one point.  D’Arby takes it like a man as his punishment, while Jojo suggests that he was lucky, since Star Platinum would normally take his entire hand.

At the beginning of the volume, Araki mentions in his author talk that he really hates cigarette smoke, and that from now on, Hol Horse is going to use a smokeless pipe instead of a cigarette.  Halfway through the volume, in an intense stare-down between Jojo and D’Arby, randomly, when the panel cuts back to Jojo, he is holding a lit cigarette that he obtained unnoticed in a split second.  D’Arby mentions this, and is appropriately freaked out by it.  I assume the chapter was drawn before Araki decided on the non-smoking nature of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, but an already hilarious scene is made even funnier by that author note.

What else… a couple old stand users reappear for the next story at the end of the volume.  It promises to be another funny altercation, though the volume ends with the four main characters being hit rather graphically by a car, so I can’t say it’s all that funny at the moment.  We know that it’s not what it appears to be, though.

Stay tuned, Arakifest 09 isn’t quite over yet.  The images from this post are once again from Jojo a Go! Go!  Killer Queen is a stand from Part IV of the series, and the other image is actually from the back of volume 23, but is one of my favorites, so I thought I’d show it off here anyway.