JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Season 1, Episode 10: New York's JoJo
[Revised 10/2018]
Well, it's been some time since I last reviewed Phantom Blood, Part 1 of the insane saga that is JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Part 2, Battle Tendency, wasn't the best-received of the various Parts back in the day. It was far longer than Phantom Blood, and prior to the anime, I think it's most remembered as "the one before the Stands come into the picture". Which, honestly, isn't very fair -- I honestly hold Battle Tendency up as one of my favourite JoJo parts, and that was before we got the anime. While Stands would ground the series in a semblance of predictability, I personally loved just how insane Battle Tendency got at times, and how high the escalating conflict ended up being.
But I digress. The beginning of Battle Tendency jumps nearly 50 years after the end of Phantom Blood, throwing us into the year of 1938. Last we saw, Dio and Jonathan are dead, while Erina escaped with a baby... and now, we're following Jonathan's grandson, Joseph, who lives in New York. The art style really doesn't make Joseph all that different from Jonathan in the comic (the easiest way to tell them apart is to look for a scarf), although thankfully the anime's colour schemes and voice acting make it a lot easier.
Episode 10 really focuses a lot more on table-setting. Two main plot threads run throughout this episode, one involving the rather mundane life of Joseph and grandma Erina as they walk around New York and befriend local street urchin Smokey, Part 2's answer to Poco. The secondary plot involves everyone's favourite supporting character, Speedwagon, who meets up with one of the Hamon warriors, Straizo (a.k.a. Straits).
The real main plot isn't exactly made clear, although Battle Tendency at least makes it pretty evident that we're going to deal with the origins of the mysterious vampire stone mask. And Speedwagon, now a multi-billionaire oil tycoon that would give Bruce Wayne a run for his money, spends a good chunk of that money to investigate a mysterious temple that's connected to the stone mask... and the mysterious stone statue that appears to be alive, with amino acids and shit. Speedwagon brings in Straizo, who's became the leader of the Hamon monks in the intervening years... and Straizo goes straight-up batshit crazy, killing his fellow monks, and rants about how he desires immortality and hamon can only prolong his life for so long.
And then Straizo straight-up kills Speedwagon, breaking his neck and tossing him away (although since this is anime, Speedwagon's last words take around three minutes to finish). It's brutal, it's sudden, the loss of Speedwagon is a gigantic gut-punch since he's easily the most major supporting character from Part 1, and Straizo is definitely built up as a pretty asshole villain we want to see brought down.
(Yes, Speedwagon doesn't die here, but for all the world it really looks like he did -- and considering that the series just killed the previous character last episode, it's not out of the question)
The scenes with Joseph is... is okay. Each main character JoJo is established pretty quickly to be a stark contrast to the previous one, and where Jonathan is the kindest man alive and a gentleman, Joseph is... a bit of a weird, crass youth. He's not quite a criminal, but he isn't afraid to lay down some violence on people that upset him... but at the same time, is the perfect grandson to Erina, and he has on his own code of honour of protecting Smokey from a bunch of racist policemen, despite Smokey trying to steal his wallet. That's a bit of a brutal scene, though, where Joseph sticks his finger up the nose of the booger cop so hard that it rips through the other side and rips out a couple of teeth in the same move, and uses his coca cola cap to absolutely break the trigger finger of his buddy. And while he'll beat up on thugs and racist cops, in the same vein, he punches one of Speedwagon's employees for breaking the bad news in front of his grandmother without any tact. Strange man, that Joseph.
Oh, and he inherits the power of Hamon -- doesn't do anything insane with it, but it's apparently instinctual and he can do enough with it with, say, the cola cap and stuff.
But I digress. The beginning of Battle Tendency jumps nearly 50 years after the end of Phantom Blood, throwing us into the year of 1938. Last we saw, Dio and Jonathan are dead, while Erina escaped with a baby... and now, we're following Jonathan's grandson, Joseph, who lives in New York. The art style really doesn't make Joseph all that different from Jonathan in the comic (the easiest way to tell them apart is to look for a scarf), although thankfully the anime's colour schemes and voice acting make it a lot easier.
Episode 10 really focuses a lot more on table-setting. Two main plot threads run throughout this episode, one involving the rather mundane life of Joseph and grandma Erina as they walk around New York and befriend local street urchin Smokey, Part 2's answer to Poco. The secondary plot involves everyone's favourite supporting character, Speedwagon, who meets up with one of the Hamon warriors, Straizo (a.k.a. Straits).
The real main plot isn't exactly made clear, although Battle Tendency at least makes it pretty evident that we're going to deal with the origins of the mysterious vampire stone mask. And Speedwagon, now a multi-billionaire oil tycoon that would give Bruce Wayne a run for his money, spends a good chunk of that money to investigate a mysterious temple that's connected to the stone mask... and the mysterious stone statue that appears to be alive, with amino acids and shit. Speedwagon brings in Straizo, who's became the leader of the Hamon monks in the intervening years... and Straizo goes straight-up batshit crazy, killing his fellow monks, and rants about how he desires immortality and hamon can only prolong his life for so long.And then Straizo straight-up kills Speedwagon, breaking his neck and tossing him away (although since this is anime, Speedwagon's last words take around three minutes to finish). It's brutal, it's sudden, the loss of Speedwagon is a gigantic gut-punch since he's easily the most major supporting character from Part 1, and Straizo is definitely built up as a pretty asshole villain we want to see brought down.
(Yes, Speedwagon doesn't die here, but for all the world it really looks like he did -- and considering that the series just killed the previous character last episode, it's not out of the question)
The scenes with Joseph is... is okay. Each main character JoJo is established pretty quickly to be a stark contrast to the previous one, and where Jonathan is the kindest man alive and a gentleman, Joseph is... a bit of a weird, crass youth. He's not quite a criminal, but he isn't afraid to lay down some violence on people that upset him... but at the same time, is the perfect grandson to Erina, and he has on his own code of honour of protecting Smokey from a bunch of racist policemen, despite Smokey trying to steal his wallet. That's a bit of a brutal scene, though, where Joseph sticks his finger up the nose of the booger cop so hard that it rips through the other side and rips out a couple of teeth in the same move, and uses his coca cola cap to absolutely break the trigger finger of his buddy. And while he'll beat up on thugs and racist cops, in the same vein, he punches one of Speedwagon's employees for breaking the bad news in front of his grandmother without any tact. Strange man, that Joseph.
Oh, and he inherits the power of Hamon -- doesn't do anything insane with it, but it's apparently instinctual and he can do enough with it with, say, the cola cap and stuff. And when Joseph gets into a fight with some random racist thug with knuckle-dusters in the restaurant, Joseph pulls off my favourite aspect of his character, which is his ability to uncannily go "next, you are going to say [X]!" and then said character will say whatever Joseph just said before realizing what he did. It's honestly a hint that for all his carefree attitude, Joseph isn't stupid. He's analytical of his surroundings -- he just tends to go for the most practical solution.
The final scene of this episode is a confrontation between vampire Straizo, who arrives in New York to kill Joseph before he controls Hamon... and it's easily one the most hilarious scene in the series when Joseph Joestar deals with this by putting up an act of being a buffoon and asking if he has fangs... before whipping out a big-ass tommy gun out of fucking nowhere and just riddling Straizo with bullets. Where the fuck did he get that thing? More importantly, HAHAHAHAHAHA! After all the buildup of all these mystical vampire and hamon powers, Joseph chooses to deal with Straizo in the most effective and mundane ways ever -- with a fuck-off gun.
Man, I love Joseph Joestar. He's just so hilariosuly over the top in everything he does. Battle Tendency often gets lumped together with Phantom Blood because they're the parts without any Stand battles that focus on vampires, but at the same time I actually like Battle Tendency a fair amount more than many other Parts simply because of how hilariously energetic and borderline insane Joseph Joestar is. Anyway, a far, far more interesting opening than Phantom Blood for sure.
The JoJo Playlist:
- Smokey is a reference to Smokey Robinson, the founder of the band Miracles. Selected discography include Cruisin', Being With You and Just To See Her.
- Not so much a song, but a little Easter Egg I would like to mention. The comic that young Joseph reads in the airplane is Baoh, an earlier work made by Araki before JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. In the original comic, the comic he's reading is actually Superman #1, which would be released in 1939, the year that Battle Tendency is set in.
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