Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Part 6: Stone Ocean vol. 6

Pale Snake is on the move!  After spending most of vol. 5 in the background, he emerges to seize the baby that Joleyne and Anastasia are protecting out in the swamps.  He’ll have to find them first, however, and even when he does he’ll still have to throw down with the wielder of Stone Ocean for this prize.  Yet when it’s all over, the time will have come for Joleyne to finally break out of Green Dolphin Street Prison.  Before she can do that, she’ll have to match wits with the prison’s top guard Mew Mew, whose stand is far more intimidating than her name.  Meanwhile, Weather Forecast and Anastasia find their own way out of prison and into the beginning of what looks to be a literal intellectual property apocalypse.

After getting back on the right track with vol. 5, vol. 6 is another weird one that sees the title’s momentum and quality all over the place.  The opening battle against Pale Snake is an easy highlight, as is most everything that focuses on him here, as it gives us the over-the-top action mixed with clever thinking that has defined this series from the start.  Mew Mew’s storyline suffers from the simple fact that it’s clear mangaka Hirohiko Araki is doing a riff on the film “Memento,” but fundamentally misunderstands how retrograde amnesia is meant to work.  As for what Weather Forecast and Anastasia get up to, it feels like the scope goes way too big too fast for their storyline to feel like it has any real stakes.  I’m hoping Araki can rein himself in to deliver a more focused vol. 7; though, his struggles to consistently deliver here may be an example of him starting to go stir-crazy and explain why he decided to change things up so dramatically for “Part 8.”