James and Steven continue their read-a-long of the Phantom Blood manga. Where the author Araki pays off the last volume by having lots of gore and shirtless action.
104: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure vol. 2
Chapters 9 and 17, 'The Stone Mask part 2' and 'The Birth of DIO'
By Hirohiko Araki
After striking a dagger at Jojo's dad, Dio is "fatally" shot by the police. The police captain expresses guilt, knowing that Dio's father was a dishonourable thief, he remembers when Jojo's father dropped charges of the theft, giving Dio's father mercy and compassion, something that he believes George Joestar, Jojo's dad should never had done. Either way, Dio is now, to everyone's surprise, a new born vampire, and so he smashes in the police captain's head from behind.
Dio obliterates the cops and manages to turn one into a ghoul, Jojo retorts by grabbing a spear from one of the old armour suits and defeats the ghoul but Dio snaps the spear and stabs Jojo in the shoulder with it. Whilst Dio gloats he turns his back on the last men standing, Jojo and Speedwagon. The game of hide and seek does not last long when an oil lamp is smashed into Dio. Luckily for Dio he can regrow his skin whilst it is in flames. Jojo leads Dio away from Speedwagon to higher ground, He strikes Speedwagon sending him flying backward to safety. Dio then throws a flaming chair at Jojo but Jojo grabs a sword, stabs it into the floor and jumps off the hilt to reach the balcony above. Jojo leaves his dead father to burn in the flames whilst Speedwagon believes that Jojo intends to fight Dio on the roof, all whilst the flames eat away the building sending them both to their death. When Dio knocks Jojo through the collapsed roof Jojo uses the spear that was impaled in his shoulder to give himself leverage, then in the middle of his jump he takes of his belt and lassos Dio's ankle. He sends Dio falling, Jojo jumps into Dio and drives the dagger that was used to kill his dad into Dio, who is then impaled after falling onto a statue below.
A badly burnt Jojo survives by using Dio's body to break his fall. When Speedwagon goes to visit the injured Jojo but is refused by the nurse. Later in the night Speedwagon breaks in to the hospital and sees that Jojo awakens to the nurse at his bedside. The nurse is Jojo's first love and long-lost sweetheart Erina. Speedwagon then leaves without giving away his presence, his heart warmed by what he has seen.
Meanwhile the Chinaman who provided Dio with the poison scavenges the ruins of the Joestar home. A charred arm reaches from out of the rumble, grabs the Chinaman's wrist and drains the man of his life force.
- Araki was relatively young and still new to storytelling as a mangaka when he made Phantom Blood. And because of this there are things in it he clearly would not do today, but in spite of this Araki tends to immerse as much twists in his action scenes as possible and this is what makes any action scene great. The problem arises however is that he struggles to build a sense of escalation, where the stakes increase the longer the fight goes on. He does a noble attempt at this by having the house on fire but the fire itself doesn't seem to have an effect on the fight itself. Jojo never coughs or struggles to breathe nor is he or Dio blinded by any smoke, then again perhaps it would have prolonged the fight to unrealistic proportions if he did that. In any case Araki chose to focus more on the props in the environment, the dagger, the spear, the flaming chair and when there seemed to be no more props left he wrote in Jojo to use his belt. If props are foreshadowed well in advance then this creates a satisfying and cohesive story. For every twist to be a surprise you have to hide the setup, but so not to confuse your reader you have to give a moment to explain what happened. Araki gets better at this with age.
- A detriment towards depicting fantastic fight scenes, especially against the supernatural, is the difficulty in reading and having the reader immersed. Manga as an art form is wholly suggestive in depicting action. In the second volume of Phantom Blood, we see Johnathan Joestar can grab items in the middle of a fall and take off his belt in the middle of a jump, sadly such scenes create a poor depiction of time as characters never feel like they are climbing or falling, more like they are floating in space as they act.
Other references:
- Another scene reminiscent to the novel Les Misérables (Victor Hugo, 1862) is when we see Dario Brando in prison for stealing from George Joestar. The interaction is very similar to the characters Jean Valjean and Bishop Myriel.
- DIO scaling the walls and coming in through the window is like the mannerisms of Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897), who was also able to do such type of activity.
- Erina and Jojo's romance exhibits an all-too-common trope, the 'Florence Nightingale Effect' named after the famous nurse and statistician who in reality was a chaste character. It's also a common phenomena too, known as "Florence Nightingale Syndrome" It is an easy way for a romance to bloom in Shonen action and battle manga, since the hero tends to be in a lot of fights the love interest builds intimacy by nursing them.
