Category: Reviews

Manga of the Month: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure

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Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (ジョジョの奇妙な冒険) by Hirohiko Araki

Lets just get this out-of-the-way. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure goes from a pretty ugly manga to a better drawn but very oddly stylized manga. If art and character designs are a high priority to you then you are not going to make it through more than a few chapters before you give up in disgust. But everyone else is going to get hooked by one of the best shonen fighting manga ever.

When you first get into shonen fighting manga you are usually wowed by the crazy characters, unique powers, and dramatic fights. But usually after a half a dozen series most people being to see that while a few shonen fighting shows stay fresh most seem to blend together in mediocrity. But even more the One Piece there is a manga that consistently stays fresh and absolutely insane even after 100+ volumes. That manga is Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.

It starts off with a “simple” story. A young man in Victorian England must learn sunlight based kung fu to avenge the death of his father at the hands of an evil vampire. But after a few volumes that young man completes his quest and then subsequently dies. At that point we learn that Jojo’s is actually a generational tale that follows the exploits of the Joestar family. Every few volumes a piece of the grand narrative will come to a close and the story jumps to another member of the Joestar family and their equally strange adventures. There is everything from mob stories to cross continental horse back races.

There are just a laundry list of reason to love Jojo’s. While the manga uses many of the standard parts of the shonen fighting formula it wisely knows that the secret to using that blueprint it to keep the ingredients you use in every iteration fresh.  By constantly changing the cast, powers, and setting at regular intervals the story may have the same vibe but no individual piece stays around long enough to wear out its welcome. Also Hirohiko Araki has a totally eccentric style so the manga is made up of honorable cyborg nazi’s, super powered dogs, invisible babies, and the most powerful and holy magical zombie of all time. Also most of the characters and powers are musical references which give the manga a catchy feel. You really just have to read Jojo’s to understand. Only the third part is commercially available but it is a great introduction to the madness.

Redline: Always Bet On JP

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For quite sometime I’d been hearing the life altering power of watching Redline so when the opportunity arose to finally see it, one does not waste time! Redline is one of those movies that reminds you of what anime is capable of beyond live action so consequently it also reminded me why I fell in love with anime in the first place. It isn’t hype, Redline is just that amazing a ride.

When only a handful of the English-speaking anime fans had seen Redline there was a good deal of contention about how much of its reputation was hype and how much of it was real. Tim Maughan was quite evangelical on the Internet which lead to a great deal of both extreme expectations and equally extreme skepticism (and often in the same people). People hoped that it was the perfection of an older and more extravagant form of animation. At the same time the long-delayed production schedule and strange release made people worried if it would be a bloated piece of retro nonsense. But now that everyone has a legitimate (and therefore less than legitimate) means to watch the film the general consensus is: it is awesome. All the promises made were true if not somewhat underplayed. Redline crossed the finish line in glorious form.

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JManga Beta: Legends of the True Savior or Chapter of Death in Love?

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Back in 2007 we ran a panel called Fan Scanlations Stole My Innocence at MangaNEXT where one of the main topics was what would be the impact of the growing popularity of fan scan aggregator sites. In 2007 the major consensus was that print media had much less to fear from the Internet due to the appeal of physical media books to the average consumer. Here in 2011 that philosophy has clearly been proven wrong as all the major publishers in Japan and America are struggling to find a way to get a working business model around manga online. Like the anime industry there seems to be money to be made but no one is exactly sure how to do so in a legal manner. So when Crunchyroll, who is one of the few companies that is making money off of legal streaming, announced that they had teamed up with a consortium on Japanese manga publishers to create their own manga portal it seemed like they might have stuck gold twice. There was a good deal of buzz around their site but not a lot of details. Now that the curtain has been lifted off of the mysterious project the question on everyone lips is will this be the site to show everyone how to market their manga online.

JManga has been a highly anticipated project for a community that is increasingly getting their media online and in a streaming format. This isn’t the first of these sites launched for manga, but it has an edge by not being beholden to one or two publishers. With the added wonder of having titles that will never see an official U.S. book release being the real clincher. The site launched on August 17th in an open beta, but it should have tweaked itself a little more beforehand.

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