Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Part 7: Steel Ball Run vol. 6

Gyoro and Johnny were left sinking in a mudpit as they faced smoldering doom from the animals outside of it when we last saw them.  Things seemed really dire for our protagonists, but Gyoro has a plan that involves Johnny’s fingernail bullets that might just save them – provided the younger man can learn it before their mystery assailant does them in.  Which… doesn’t happen of course – the bit about the mystery assailant doing them in as the concluding chapters of “Silent Ways” take on the shape of a familiar Shonen Jump trope of a hero gaining new and greater powers when faced with certain doom.  Mangaka Hirohiko Araki may not have churned these chapters out on a weekly basis, but he hasn’t lost his understanding of how to make this kind of story work. Even if I think that the antagonist of this arc was ultimately dispatched before their time, after the introduction they were given earlier in the series, Johnny’s new understanding of his powers gets this volume off to a strong start.

That continues through “The Promised Land:  Snow Mountain” as our protagonists head north and find themselves faced with a familiar fairytale dilemma when a mysterious girl asks them about what they dropped in a pool:  Something ordinary or something golden.  Even if Gyoro and Johnny are smart enough to know how this works, Araki adds another twist to this setup that turns it into what a remake of “Brewster’s Millions” would look like if it was directed by Guillermo Del Toro.  While I didn’t really care much for the generic gunslinging antagonists of this arc, the protagonists’ desperation and efforts to find a creative way out of their situation make for an entertaining story.  I’m not going to begrudge them a break after that arc, however, as Lucy Steel dealing with the (secret lesbian) wife of the President of the United States and a Stand User with deadly balloon animal powers certainly sound like all the reason I need to anticipate the next volume.