Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Part 2: Battle Tendency vol. 1

I didn’t bother to review the final part of “Part 1” as I would’ve just been repeating what I said about this series for its first two volumes:  There were glimmers of potential, but things hadn’t come together just yet.  Fortunately, “Part 2” kicks off with the kind of craziness that I like to see from this series.  The story picks up in 1938, 49 years after the end of the first part, as Speedwagon has discovered a set of ruins with a connection to the mask that gave Dio his power.  Venturing further into them, Speedwagon and his crew find a man in stasis inside a pillar and BETRAYAL!  (By someone I had to go back and crack open vol. 3 of “Part 1” in order to remember who he was.)  Now it’s up to charmingly goofy rapscallion Joseph Joestar to use his burgeoning hamon powers to take on this new menace when it comes for him in New York, and then to Mexico where he finds out that the Nazis have seized the Pillar Man for their own ends.  The only problem for them is that his is a power so great that it’ll require them to team up with Joseph in order to put it down.

So yeah, things are already substantially crazier here than they were in “Phantom Blood.”  Toss in mangaka Hirohiko Araki’s gleefully over-the-top version of 1930’s New York — where Joseph punches a cop’s finger up his nose and then proceeds to manhandle some mafiosos — and you’ve got a series that is finally starting to hit its stride.  This isn’t something you’re going to want to read for its plot, as the volume is pretty much one long string of fight scenes strung together by lots of jibber-jabber about why they need to happen.  The joy of “Jojo’s” lies in seeing just how bizarre things can get:  Either through the outlandish twists in each fight  (Where did those grenades come from!) or the defiantly strange stylization Araki puts into his art.  It also helps that Joseph is a much more charismatic protagonist than his grandfather.  Thoroughly reckless, but with a good heart and fighting smarts, he adds a lot of energy to the proceedings.  It’s easy to see why Joseph was kept around for “Part 3,” and waiting for “Jojo’s” to catch up to that just became far less of a slog with this volume.