Oh, JoJo: Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable

I was going to write a review of the godawful TITANS, but decided against it. It would be waste of my time since no one reads this thing anyway, and it seems that when it comes to superheroes on television, the hack writing and slapdash production evidenced in TITANS is what people want. Suffice to say I did not enjoy it, and I'm perplexed that anyone could.

So I thought I'd focus on something that I also recently finished. Something I adored. Something that is so highly polished and thought out, so clever and so much its own thing. And that thing was JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable.

JoJo tells the story of the Joestar family, starting back in the 1880s in dear old England. Each series deals with one member of the Joestar family, who is the 'JoJo' of the show's title. Each series leaps ahead in time, since the awesome of the Joestar family often skips generations (but not always). Diamond Is Unbreakable is the fourth part of the Joestar Saga, taking place in a small town in Japan in 1999.

This time 'JoJo' is a teenage boy with a weird fashion sense called Josuke Higashikata, the illegitimate son of a previous JoJo, Joseph Joestar. Like his father and nephew, Jotaro, Josuke has something called a Stand. Stands are like separate entities tied to a person, each with their own power or ability. Stands were introduced in the previous series, Stardust Crusaders, where it seemed they were rare things. But due to plot events in Unbreakable, several Stands begin to manifest in Josuke's small town. And one of them belongs to a serial killer.

Diamond Is Unbreakable, all 39 episodes of it, tells the story of the various Stands that arise in this quiet and unassuming town and how Josuke and his friends--who also have Stands--deal with them. Whereas the previous series was driven by a quest to save a Joestar family member, this series seems to meander all over the place, almost to the point of distraction. But as the serial killer storyline is brought into tighter focus, it becomes clear there was a reason for that. As the series comes to a climax, the series becomes as tense and dark as the previous series.

One of the things I like most about JoJo is how with each new series, you hate the new JoJo. You miss the previous one, and it takes a very long time to warm up to this clear imposter to the JoJo name. But by the end, you adore them, and are sad to see their time in the spotlight come to an end.

I also enjoy how JoJo masterfully builds tension with most episodes, writing itself into a corner that you're not sure how they'll pull themselves out of. Yet they always do, and they never cheat. The rules are clearly laid out, be it through character traits or Stand powers. Every resolution feels earned, even if you find yourself having to go back several episodes to see where that particular plot point was laid down.

JoJo is also just gloriously weird. The Stand powers are always strange. The titular JoJo is always a bit odd, be it Jotaro's standoffishness from Stardust Crusaders to Josuke's money scams or 1940's bouffant. The show is so much it's own thing, uncaring of what anyone thinks of it. The focus group for JoJo just seems to be that of its creator, Hirohiro Araki, and no one else.

It's a glorious series, and more worthy of your time and attention than another cynical re-imaging of other things I could mention.