Every main character in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has the nickname JoJo). The star of the manga is Jonathan Joestar (or JoJo for short.
Phantom Blood was the first series which premiered in 1987. This also made it hard for the series to get translated due to copyright issues, but the good people at Viz Media have managed to do it and do it well! He even references a Rihana song in part 8, so he doesn’t just limit himself to the classics. Most of the references aren’t subtle, but it’s still fun to see them. One of the main characters in Phantom Blood is named Dio Brando (an obvious reference to Ronnie James Dio). He’s also a huge music nerd! There are so many references to popular music in JoJo. JoJo is a globetrotting adventure and the series has visited almost every continent except for Australia and Antarctica. Araki is a unique creator in the manga world, focusing on more international culture rather than just writing about Japan. That’s right, this series is still going! This series is really special and I think it translates well to a western audience. I want to focus on part 1, “Phantom Blood.” JoJo is split up into 7 parts with an 8th part still running in Japan. This revival also created a push for more JoJo in the West, resulting in the release of the first two parts in English for the first time ever!
The classic series saw a huge revival with a successful TV series that created a huge media hype for more JoJo. Until around 2012, JoJo stayed extremely popular in the manga world but didn’t really appear anywhere else. The series had an animated mini-series (known as an OVA in Japan), but it wasn’t well received. JoJo also never saw much success outside of the manga world. There was also a well-liked video game, but otherwise, that was it. JoJo saw little success in the West, only getting a small portion of the series translated into English and out of order. Something about JoJo was special and it managed to claw its way into the social zeitgeist of Japan. It was a copycat series through and through, and yet JoJo is one of the most popular and long-lasting manga series to date. The characters are unbelievably proportioned and the violence is taken up to eleven. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, written and drawn by Hirohiko Araki, was clearly influenced by Fist of the North Star. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Part 1: The Phantom Blood cover by Hirohiko Araki. That’s how bonkers the manga could get, but it had an engaging story set in a Mad Max-style post-apocalypse.
For example, and I kid you not, a man gets his head blown in two but keeps it together just by holding the two halves of his head together. A main selling point for most readers was Fist of the North Star’s extreme level of violence. This series was so popular it even saw brief success in the West. To give a little bit of background, during the 80s there was an extremely popular manga series called Fist of the North Star. Today, I want to talk about the Shazam of the manga world, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.
The manga scene is full of imitators and copy cats trying to get big off of an established idea. Well, this trend isn’t exclusive to western comics. To use a more modern example, look at all the Batman movies and how many other superhero movies tried to copy that same aesthetic. At one point, Shazam was even more popular than Superman because of that gimmick. This allowed kids in the ’40s to project themselves into the character and made him a smash hit. Shazam is actually a little kid named Billy Batson. Have you ever noticed that some superheroes and popular characters feel like rip-offs of other, more famous characters? For example, Shazam was clearly copied wholesale from Superman, however, the creators managed to give their own spin on the character.