Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure 28

Hirohiko Araki – Viz – 2010 – 104+ volumes
This is English volume 16, I just like using the Japanese numbers.

Every year I do the Arakifest on June 7 as a celebration of the amazing coincidence that I share a birthday with one of my favorite artists. Except this year I forgot my own birthday (I suddenly remembered yesterday, and my priority was not letting my license plates expire), so I have no extra content to offer you aside from the review of the final volume of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure part 3.

Which is okay, because honestly, this is way better than anything else I would’ve talked about today.

I read an article in the back of the first Elephantmen graphic novel recently, written by Richard Starkings. He talks a lot about the history of British comics. All of it is interesting, but he talks about Pat Mills and 2000 AD specifically as an inspiration. That it was work like Flesh that made him appreciate comics that are specifically written as fantastic stories for ten-year-old boys. These particular comics have a spectacular, over-the-top hook, and then run with it, but also don’t take themselves too seriously or get bogged down in boring, depressing details. In the case of Flesh, the fantastic hook is that cowboys have come to the cretaceous period and are rounding up dinosaurs to send back to the present in time machines, because the planet is too polluted to raise any other source of meat. In Elephantmen, it’s croc-men fistfighting with hippo-men over ancient artifacts.

In Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, it’s vampires fighting a tough-guy high school student with ghost versions of themselves while stopping time long enough to do hilariously over-the-top things. I’m the biggest fan of well-written action comics with unusual ideas executed with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor. It’s a difficult thing to do, and not even Elephantmen pulls it off very well (every issue is too much like a pity party for that). Flesh does, and well enough to have a British killer animal predecessor (Hook Jaw, about a shark) and a successor (Shako, about a polar bear). Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure has always hits these buttons for me, and this final volume just cements its place in my personal comics hall of fame forever.

I can’t talk about this without spoiling it, so I’m going to cut the rest of the review (“review” being relative, because I’m just going to talk about everything and gush embarrassingly). Suffice to say, I could not have been happier with the way things turned out. While the outcome may have been obvious, getting there was one of the most spectacular and unusual rides in comics. I was not disappointed, and I urge any sort of fan of shounen manga to go out and read Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. It’s strange, but you will not be disappointed in the end.

This volume covers the final battle between Jojo and Dio. While most of the other fights have been fairly puzzle-oriented, where the characters avoid a fight and instead need to figure out why the enemy has an advantage and how to overcome it, the Dio/Jojo fight is more likely to be a straight-out battle. After all, Star Platinum and The World are the two most powerful stands in existence, and there hasn’t been a straight-out fight the whole series. Why not?

Except The World still has an advantage over Star Platinum: it can stop time. Dio can stop time long enough to make it impossible for Jojo to either dodge his blows or land a punch. So how does one overcome this?

By bluffing. And double bluffing. The whole fight is still kind of a puzzle. Jojo has to figure out how to overcome the weakness of stopped time, and he tricks Dio into thinking he can do it. And then tricks him into thinking he can’t. This goes back and forth. The hilariously elaborate bluffs go above and beyond anything that’s come before. And they work beautifully because the reader is fooled as well. Maybe Jojo really can’t move while time is stopped. Maybe he really can. Oops, I guess not, he was using a magnet. Just kidding, he can.

And that’s just one chapter. This happens for the entire fight. The next scene is also beautiful. Dio stops time and throws a thousand knives, too many for Jojo to dodge. Jojo falls down dead, stabbed all over with knives, including through the forehead with one that sank in to the handle. Then the reader is let in on the fact that Jojo stashed books all over his body, including one that somehow blocks that terrible stab through his forehead. What would be a cop-out in any other series works as a wonderful joke in the context of this serious fight, where it is in fact not a joke (it also works because Araki makes no effort to cover up what a terrible cop-out it is). Dio shoots Jojo’s still body with a gun, to make sure he’s dead. To Dio, it looks like the bullet enters his leg. The reader is shown that Star Platinum has caught the bullet just inside of Jojo’s pantleg. Then Dio listens closer, to see whether or not Jojo is breathing. To fool Dio into thinking he’s dead, he has to hold his breath. Unfortunately, Dio can hear hearts beating too. I guess Star Platinum will have to HOLD HIS HEART STILL IN HIS CHEST FOR A FULL MINUTE. There is a really awesome three-page sequence of Star Platinum’s fist squeezing Jojo’s heart in his chest. Later, to make sure he recovers quickly, that same sequence is used to show Star Platinum squeezing Jojo’s heart rapidly in order to get it beating again. Jojo complains about having to stop his own heart in an extremely deadpan and underwhelming way, as if he was complaining about the weather.

I don’t even know how to critique this. It’s fantastic. Reading it was like nothing else. There was no doubt in my mind about Jojo winning, but I literally went through this entire fight laughing hysterically, not knowing what was going to happen next, and marveling at how well everything escalated. It’s really unbelievable. It’s a world where we get little bubbles that show us just what bones are breaking when someone is getting punched all over, or getting their skull caved in. A world where throwing a knife somehow blows up a car. A world where fistfighting on either side of a falling steamroller is some sort of climax.

And honestly? Every series should end with the main character walking away from the bad guy saying that the only reason he lost was that he made the good guy angry. What a badass. Contemporary bad boys have nothing on Jotaro Kujo.

And to prove that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, after an extremely unlikely blood transfusion and revival, Joseph Joestar somehow does something even more badass than that, and in poor taste to boot.

The series ends with the characters listening to the Beatles song “Get Back.”

Perfect. My God, it was perfect.