Oct 20, 2016

Welcome everyone to what will hopefully be a long series of this chapter discussion thread, I Will try and update this as often as I can when I have the time but I think I can manage this but anyway lets get into it.



JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is a Japanese Manga Written and illustrated by famed artist Hirohiko Araki and was released on January 1, 1987 and is currently ongoing. Anime and Manga in the early 80s was changing, the medium was moving from kids shows to being marketed towards teenagers. Manga artists would take inspiration form 80s American action stars like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger to make their characters into these buff manly hero's who would protect the innocent ( an example of this is Kenshiro from fist of the north star). JoJo's first arc Phantom Blood is no exception to this as the main character Johnathan Joestar is a very muscular man who is a gentleman that protects the weak. What made JoJo stand out from the other series at the time was how Araki made his characters preform flamboyant poses which look like this

And this.

And finally this.

Also it has a good and interesting story filled with vampires, supernatural spirts made from your soul that fight for you and has some cool musical references along with a fantastic artwork.

so with that out of the way lets look at the first chapter, a little warning JoJo scans are notorious for having bad translations for some of the arcs, I will try and avoid this by finding websites that have proper translations.

http://www.mangahere.co/manga/jojo_s_bizarre_adventure/v001/c001/ if you would like to read along.

The Coming of Dio:
this chapter starts off with a sacrifice of a young maiden by what appears to be a tribal chief wearing a stone mask. The chief states the fresh blood of this maiden will bring the demonic mask to life, Unfortunately for the sacrifice it means her death.


What happens next is the blood activates the mask and bone like claws impale the chiefs head. The chief proclaims to have received eternal life from the mask while his followers cheer him on, one of them even volunteers to become his life force talk about some ride or die n----s.


The chief then proceeds to jab his fingers into his followers neck and sucks the life force out of him while gaining supernatural strength. Now what would anyone do with this new found power, slam your homies corpse into the ground destroying the staircase below you in the most disrespectful way to treat someone who gave their life force to you. The next scene has a Narrator explain that this is the 12-16th century B.C. in central Mexico, the tribe is called the sun people Aztecs who engage in sacrifice and cannibalism. The Narrator states that another tribe has possession of this mysterious stone mask and dominate the earth, the stone mask promises eternal life but apparently the tribes disappeared so much for immortality I guess, this leads to the next part of this bizarre adventure.

The next page begins in a somewhat modern time inside a room. An old man who lays sick in a bed calls out to his devilishly handsome son Dio ( named after Ronnie James Dio ) to come next to him. From this scene we can infer that Dio does not like his father as he has this very annoyed look on his face which we find out later that Dio unsurprisingly doesn't have much love for his father. Dio's father tells him that he is dying soon and gives him a letter telling him to go to the address on it claiming that "he" will take care of you as this person owes him. We are then given a flashback in the year 1868 when Dio's Father and Mother stumble upon a crashed carriage of a rich family, While Dio's father proceeds to loot everything, Dio's mother hears the cries of an infant and tries to tell her husband who continues to loot he even finds the stone mask but what is it doing here? Well we will find out soon, Dio's father goes to remove the ring of a man he believes is dead only to his shock find out that this man is still alive. The man is George Joestar and he thanks Dario ( Dio's dad) for saving his life and his child's life even though that wasn't the case, flash forward to the present and Dario dies from his illness and Dio spits on his fathers grave and goes to his new home.

The next page gives us a little history of England and goes on to a scene with a couple of bully's who have stolen a doll from Erina. When it looks all over for Erina our main protagonist Johnathan Joestar comes to the rescue and attempts to save this girl from the bully's but ultimately gets his a--- beat. After the loss Johnathan yells at Erina saying that he saved her from them because he is a gentleman and that's what they do, he then runs off to his house ( one big a--- mansion), we then see a carriage pull up which Johnathan deduces is for the new adopted brother Dio that his father mentioned. This is where Araki's style of making a normal scene into a over exaggerated one, Dio jumps out to meet his new "brother". This scene stuck out to me as I thought Dio and JoJo would start off as good friends as they both greeted each other non aggressively but I was wrong when Dio gave JoJo's dog Danny the good ole knee to the face. The chapter ends with Dio plotting his plan to take over the Joestar family fortune.

Overall I liked this chapter very much it gave us an insight on the mysterious stone mask even though it wasn't that much but it becomes very important later on in the series and in the other arcs. It also shows us a small glimpse of Dio's personality which gets worse later on in the story, what I didn't like about this chapter was its length. I felt like there could've have been more added to this chapter but it gave us some important details about Dio and the Joestar family connection and the history of the stone mask.

I give this chapter an 8/10

What do you think, did you like this chapter or not, what do you think will happen? Comment if you like, I will try and do another one tomorrow when I get the chance.