Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Arc 4 by Hirohiko Araki

Synopsis: Josuke Higashikata is a very cool dude, he is nice and quite popular at school, unless you make the big mistake of dissing his hair, that would get you beaten up and then healed almost at the same time. That is his stand ability; Crazy Dimond. It can kill you or heal you, destroy walls only to reconstruct them at different places. What he doesn’t know is that some one is increasing the numbers of stand users in his native town, each one more dangerous than the one that came before him. Now Josuke must stop this rapidly growing wave of stand users with evil goals, or his town will be corrupt for ever.

____________________

At first Arc 4 can be a little deceiving. You think one thing and it ends up being a different thing, this is works for most of the fights, all of them, and the plot. I say the plot, because Arc 4 can be divided into two major stories, the rest are either filler or transitional chapters, if not volumes. The good thing is that both major stories are interesting, entertaining although you won’t be loosing sleeping hours because of them. If you are a fan of Hirohiko Araki’s action and art you will surely love this one too, and if you liked the previous arcs you won’t be disappointed with this one.

Unless you find some of the characters annoying and even sometimes useless. And if you hope to see a bad ass taking the lead role, well, consider yourselves warned that Josuke isn’t the bad ass that Jotaro was in Arc 3. In fact even thought Jotaro appears quite a lot in this arc his role is not as important or significant as that of Josuke. Hirohiko Araki following his tradition of inspiring character designs gives us a further taste of his inking and drawing skills that transport us to a world where everything is possible. It is as if he made a list of all the cool powers every human could have and decided to give one power from the list to all of his characters, people that can make bombs, or super sensitive smell, or healing, or freezing your opponent, or reading a person like a book, and all of them fitting their personalities. That is one of the great things about the Jojo saga, the abilities match the personalities making them quite believable, even if the powers are, for lack of a better word, bizarre.

But, you shouldn’t read Arc 4 if you didn’t like Arc 3 or if you haven’t read Arc 3. If you didn’t like Arc 3 you can avoid this one as they are quite similar in terms of characters, although, I preferred the characters in Arc 3 than in Arc 4 and if you haven’t read Arc 3, you will be thrown off your feet with the spoilers it gives since it is considering you have read it. If you have read Arc 3 and like it, then go ahead and read Arc 4 by all means. It is quite entertaining and will offer quite a bit of thrills, specially the second major story.

My real problem with Arc 4, is the ending, it did leave quite a bit number of question unanswered, leaving it to the readers interpretation, which can be good and can be bad. It is good because it gives a chance for further story lines to merge together giving it coherence to the whole saga, as thin and delicate as it may be. But giving the fact that the saga and Hirohiko Araki aren’t very well known for their coherence it might be a handicap in the future. Either way, I don’t see why you shouldn’t pick this one up, except for the reasons mentioned above, give it a try, it won’t disappoint.