JoJo's Manga Thread: Welcome to the Gay Man's World

Xibanya · # ¿ Jun 15, 2015 23:18

Hi Jojo manga thread. I've long been aware of the Jojo franchise and its characters since the MAME rom is in frequent rotations at parties among my friends, but I've only recently gotten into the manga. I'm really digging it, particularly when the style goes off the rails during the Jotaro chapters (vol 13 onwards?) I did a huge series of effort posts for the DBZ thread on the art of the Dragonball manga and I'm planning an effort post (or series of posts since it's getting a bit long) comparing the art of Jojo with the art of Dragonball, with a particular focus on Jojo's emotional intensity and the influences both manga have had on the punchman mangas that followed in their footsteps. Do any of you know of any essays on the art of Jojo or Jojo's influence? Google hasn't given me anything too satisfactory yet, but I'm sure there's something out there and I'd rather cite that than reinvent the wheel.

Also, question, does Dio actually have a bone nub in the shape of a heart on his forehead?

Adbot · # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 18:52

Xibanya · # ¿ Jun 16, 2015 00:23

Thanks, melodicwaffle and Bad Seafood, those are actually very helpful.

Xibanya · # ¿ Jun 16, 2015 07:48

Aurain posted:

Xibanya, based on your posts in the DBZ thread, would I be mistaken in thinking you can read some Japanese? If you can, this book is going to be awesome for you. http://jojo.wikia.com/wiki/Hirohiko_Araki%27s_Manga_Technique It's actually pretty cheap if you find a place to buy it too. Only around the same price as a regular tankobon over there.

It's literally about how he goes about drawing his manga.

You could also probably write for days about the artistic evolution Araki undergoes throughout JoJo too.

In fact sans-dictionary I am solidly at N4, and shaky at N3; that and 250 yen will get you a cup of coffee (although it was mighty handy when I was tooling around the back roads of Gunma prefecture two weeks ago. マリファナを毎日吸います) But with a dictionary I could certainly puzzle it out. Thanks for the heads up!

Xibanya · # ¿ Jun 16, 2015 08:23

Bad Seafood posted:

Somebody on the Jojo forums bought a copy and translated the table of contents. Should help with figuring out which sections you want to puzzle out first.

The nice thing about that table of contents is that I can already tell that he's taken many cues from Lajos Egri (whose 1942 "The Art of Dramatic Writing" is basically the gold standard of creative writing guides) so in fact I could probably predict with reasonable accuracy what he's going to say about several of the topics, though I'm still intensely curious to read it for myself. "Keep the theme steady" and "when the story gets in the way" seem particularly Egri-esque (in fact I wrote a lot of :words:

on the former in part 4 of my DB art series) so I strongly recommend picking up Egri's book if you really want to hear it straight from the horse's mouth.

I'm looking forward particularly to discussing the way Araki's art intentionally evokes intense emotional responses in the reader. If anyone wants a primer, Scott McCloud's "Making Comics" has a great set of pages on the balance a comic book artist has to strike between clarity and intensity.

Xibanya · # ¿ Jun 22, 2015 23:42

Hi thread, remember the chart from this lecture by Araki that Bad Seafood shared?

http://comipress.com/article/2006/07/25/516

Well, since I'm in the middle of a long effort post about the art of Dragonball vs. the art of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure I figured it would be helpful to translate it fully, so I did. Also since I hadn't heard of most of the named titles, I spent way too much time making an interactive version of the diagram that shows you the art of the series in question, which you can find here (enable javscript):

http://xibanya.neocities.org/arakichart.html

And here's the non-fancy version:

To be honest I'm a little surprised by where Araki places some of the series, so I wanted to hash that out now before I keep writing about something that might be off-base. I'm not sure if I agree 100% with where Araki has placed Jojo (yes, the original chart just says "Jojo") in relation to the axis labels and other series, but I'm only really familiar with parts 1 -3. It seems really weird to me that Araki is saying that his series is about as grounded in world-building as Dragonball - for my planned effort post series I'm actually hoping to explore Araki's use of the "hyperreal," or symbols of real places in order to evoke an emotion instead of literally depicting a specific real place. The impression I get is that Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is a story all about intense emotions, while Dragonball barely touches on characters' inner lives and is more concerned with creating a totally new world and showing rad fight choreography. Am I getting Jojo totally wrong or is it just that the series shifts focus in the parts after 3? Or is the chart just confusing?

Comipress article posted:

In the case of Jojo, Araki is trying to pursue reality by portraying things with classical methodology, but he gives precedence to emotion and inner thought over plot structure, trying to portray the protagonists' destiny, so he ends up in the bottom-left quadrant.

In that case, shouldn't he end up in the top-left quadrant? The axes are unmistakable, it's the upper-y axis that is labeled "inner mind and emotions." (心の内面や感情を主に表現するテーマを追ったもの) Araki!! :argh:

Xibanya · # ¿ Jun 24, 2015 07:22

Brannock posted:

I'm loving this post and would also love to see more from you Xibanya.

You're in luck, I've got words about Japanese comics for everyone! I've been wanting to compare the art of DB with the art of Jojo for a little while now. I'll give this thread the rough cut first (minus some more Dragonball-specific paragraphs.) Why compare DB with JJBA? They are both influential shonen fighting comics from the same era, are both fantastic, and have completely different approaches to their storytelling style and art. Appreciating what makes them different helps us to appreciate the techniques that were employed in each and helps us appreciate the contributions they made to the comics that came after them.

In the DBZ thread I discussed some of the key features of Dragonball that make its art so appealing, particularly its clarity. (You can read about it here: https://manuelamalasanya.wordpress.com/effort-series/) I demonstrated Toriyama's use of clarity of form to visually communicate the story of Dragonball by blocking in the characters' silhouettes like this:

Arguably the most valuable tools in Toriyama's arsenal are clarity of forms and clarity of spatial relationships. The most valuable tools to Araki...are not. Have a look at the following. I took six pages from Dragonball chapter 159 (Goku vs. King Piccolo) and six pages from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure chapter 262 (Jotaro vs. Dio) and applied the exact same lovely photoshop filters to them. Here's the result:

Dragonball

Jojo

What that's meant to prove is that overall, Dragonball has much stronger clarity of form (it's easier to tell what the drawings are supposed to represent.) That does not mean, however, that Dragonball's art is better or that Jojo's art is hard to read. The reason why Jojo is much less clear than Dragonball is because it has features that make it much more intense. Per Scott McCloud's "Making Comics," intensity comes at the expense of clarity. If the artist pulls it off, it can be well worth the trade-off.

Grades of Abstraction
The nature of the stories that Toriyama and Araki wanted to tell respectively dictated the style. Before Toriyama or Araki submitted the first chapter of Dragonball or Jojo, they had committed to telling a story with a specific premise, genre, and tone. Fortunately I don't need to speculate on Araki's opinion on what kind of story he wanted to tell, because he provided this handy chart (the same one I posted two pages ago):

(you can play with the sweet interactive version here: http://xibanya.neocities.org/arakichart.html)

Araki aimed to tell a suspenseful story with sweeping drama and high stakes. For that reason, the world of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (horror/fighting genre) is established as one of consequences. This gives Araki the freedom to depict intense psychodrama but means the action can't depart too far from what is literally possible. (Part of what makes things in the series bizarre is that what happens stand out next to all the realistic stuff that's already there.) This allows characters to change more realistically over time, making characters more complex and interesting and keeping the story exciting with high stakes and running tension, but the author runs the risk of changing the characters into something less interesting or even really stupid (like Marvel's Speedball --> Penance thing.) The world of JJBA is one where characters' emotions are very real and should be inferred from the subtext. A more realistic style is ideal for this type of story as it will heighten the reader's engagement with the characters' inner lives. For the first three arcs, I would actually place Jojo's Bizarre Adventure in the upper left quadrant of the graph.

At first, Toriyama only intended Dragonball to be a short pastiche of Journey to the West, and from the very first chapter we have a girl shooting a boy in the face with no lasting harm done and an attack by a talking dinosaur. The world of Dragonball (gag/fighting genre) is established as one with almost no consequences. This gives Toriyama the freedom to depict a wider range of actions at the expense of emotional verisimilitude. Characters can have all manner of misfortune befall them but they stay static, both an advantage and a disadvantage. Characters can get into situations that would traumatize an ordinary person but be unaffected, making the situation humorous instead of tragic - the disadvantage is that interest can't be maintained through tension alone since the stakes are never too high; furthermore, if a character stays static too long they wear out their welcome and get kind of stale. DB world is not one with deep psychological issues nor emotional suffering. We default to assuming characters aren't emotionally affected and if that isn't the case, we're explicitly told. A more abstract style is ideal for this type of story as it will amplify the humor.

Line art
Instead of reinventing the wheel, I'll just post this bit from "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud:

I'm sure you can reach your own conclusions.

Panel Focus/Expression
Here are all the faces that Goku makes in chapter 159 the same size they appear in relation to each other.

And here's every face Jotaro makes in chapter 262 at the same size they appear in relation to each other.

Nearly every shot of Goku shows his entire body, while Jotaro's face takes up a significant amount of panel real estate. Because Goku is drawn in a very cartoony style, his expressions are easy to parse but limited in nuance, while Jotaro is drawn in a style that's much closer to realism, meaning he has a wider range of subtle emotions but they require more attention from the reader to be correctly detected. Clearly in Dragonball the focus is more on what the character is literally doing, while the focus in Stardust Crusaders is more on how the character is feeling.

In light of this, if in a scene Goku and Jotaro are both equally angry, Goku HAS to be much more obviously angry than Jotaro does - since we understand that we're in a world where actions have real consequences, we can trust that Jotaro is really upset under his cool demeanor. We can't trust that a character in Dragonball has any deeper emotion than the one that's obviously there. On the flip side, if Araki exaggerates characters' expressions too much then he runs the risk of losing their grounding in reality and making them look emotionally unstable (sometimes he does this on purpose.)

Things are a little more ho-hum in Dragonball world.

If this woman were in JJJBA, she'd be monstrously grotesque. In Dragonball she's just a humorously unattractive lady.

In JJBA this is the insane laughter of a disturbed vampire. In Dragonball world, it's just a Super Saiyan bargain sale. :what:

What's next:
The obvious differences out of the way, if you weren't all bored to tears by the :words:

, what I want to really explore in-depth at a later date are the following topics: extreme violence vs. tight choreography, hyperreal vs. fantasy, panel layout, and transitions.

Xibanya fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Jun 24, 2015

Xibanya · # ¿ Jun 24, 2015 19:00

Thanks everybody, I really appreciate it. I'm still a newcomer to JJBA and I'm reading the Viz editions of the manga, which means I haven't looked much at part 4 on. If anyone knows of good examples from any part of the series of unusual panel sizes and layouts, particularly insane poses, gruesome fights, or anything else that might be a good example of Jojo's intensity, let me know.

Xibanya · # ¿ Jun 24, 2015 20:06

Senor Candle posted:

If you could do me a huge favor and timg those first huge pictures I would really appreciate it. I want to read your post but have to scroll back and forth is a bummer.

Shoot, sorry about that! It's fixed now.

quote:

Also there is a scene early on in part 4

quote:

Towards the end of part 5

Holy poo poo those sound :black101:

as gently caress. :swoon:

Xibanya · # ¿ Jun 24, 2015 21:27

Is it bad that I can't tell what happened? :ohdear:

Did Jolene set herself on fire?

Xibanya · # ¿ Jun 24, 2015 22:13

Senor Candle posted:

Why would you post that version when you could post this one?
I will say don't read the fourth page if you don't want a spoiler on who the bad guy is in Part 6

Bad Seafood posted:

I'm actually glad you addressed this, since back when I was reading your art of Dragon Ball posts the first comic I pulled off my shelf to compare was Jojo...which didn't exactly hold up well to the silhouette experiment. I wondered at that time, but didn't ask, about your opinion of Araki's art. I'm pleased to see he gets a good grade, albeit for different reasons.

Yep, you picked one of the exceptions that prove the rule. Jojo's intensity is really hard to do well. What I've noticed with a lot of amateur artists (like the kids I knew in art classes in high school...including myself) and some professional artists (people on B and C-list DC/Marvel titles, I'm looking at you) is that they read a comic like Jojo and are blown away by what an incredible experience it is and try to bottle that magic in their own comics. What they end up doing is taking their comic and then splattering on a bunch of panel breaks, speed lines, close up shots of faces, long vertical panels, and so on because they feel like that's just what you're supposed to do rather than realizing the specific application of each of those techniques. Each one of those techniques reduces the clarity of the comic. If all these art intensifiers aren't also intensifying the narrative itself, then you wind up with a huge mess. I'd call it cargo-cult comicbooking. Historically you can look back at the grimdarkification of the 90s, and a lot of that goes back to people being blown away by The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen and wanting to recreate some of that magic. Then suddenly pouches and tiny feet out the yin-yang.

quote:

Something else I'm glad you've touched on is Jotaro. A lot of people like to complain about his stoic personality, some even saying he has no personality, but I've always felt he just never wore much of it on his sleeve. He's cool-headed and composed, sure, but you can find little hints as to who he is underneath if you read closely enough - and Part 3 is perhaps my most reread part, so I've certainly had time to get to know him closely. When I learned Araki's inspiration for Jotaro was Clint Eastwood, it made perfect sense.

In a way I can't blame people. In most shonen, what you see is what you get, and trying to read anything deeper than a surface reading is really barking up the wrong tree and maybe trying too hard to justify liking a kid's show. One of the most annoying aspects of most shonen is that even though most characters' designs are simple enough that their facial expressions are unmistakable, characters are usually always narrating exactly how they feel, so readers are basically trained to not make any inferences about any main characters' inner life. With Jojo you have to approach it like a live-action film, a Clint Eastwood movie, perhaps? :haw:

People are used to not having their hand held and being asked to make some inferences when watching a movie, my only guess is that it's the medium and genre throwing everybody off.

quote:

I doodle quite a bit in my spare time, but I'm no artist. I lack the language and the knowledge necessary to analyze things panel to panel, down to the brushstrokes.

Both my grandfather and my mother were painters, so I have the advantage of being steeped in this stuff, but anybody can learn the language of art. I didn't major in art and now I work in IT. Keep doodling and keep improving!

Xibanya · # ¿ Jun 25, 2015 05:48

BaDandy posted:

You've probably been reading Phantom Blood too, but I was looking over it again for things to potentially write about and I was wondering if you were going to bring up Araki's emphasis on "This story has two protagonists", with how the story centers about both Jonathan and Dio, how Araki gives equal screen time to the both of them and their feelings, how that's emphasized through periodic cuts to show close ups of them right to each other as the story goes on, stuff like that.

I hadn't planned to initially, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to dive into the actual thematic content of the different narratives. If I'm not Jojo'd out by the time I finish the other planned topics I will definitely turn to that next!

Xibanya · # ¿ Jun 25, 2015 19:03

When the SC gang is about to go scuba diving, Joseph tries to teach them some basic hand signs, (and Polnareff teaches us a more advanced hand sign :allears:

) and then someone says "why don't we just talk through our stands?" and everyone is like "yeah, good call!" Does that just mean that stand users can speak to each other telepathically? Otherwise how would a non-humanoid stand like Hermit Purple talk? Or is this some nonsense like how apparently Zoro in One Piece can communicate with swords in his mouth because he "speaks from his heart"?

Xibanya · # ¿ Jun 25, 2015 19:34

Aurain posted:

It's inconsistent though, because Joseph picking up on Jotaro wanting to cheat D'Arby the Gamer is written as though he instinctively picked up on it, but if they can talk telepathically, that's not really something they'd go for.

Maybe when they talk telepathically it's like conventional talking in that it's just as audible as regular speech?

Good grief, I just remembered how I used to watch Kratt's Creatures when I was 7 and 8 and I actually believed that the dialog spoken during the parts where the brothers were scuba diving was actually them talking while they were swimming but in hindsight they must have done the audio later in ADR...unless they were stand users.

Xibanya · # ¿ Jun 26, 2015 19:59

I've started reading Diamond is Unbreakable, and you guys are absolutely right. There's a TON of worldbuilding going on. The difference in the way the setting is handled is like night and day. I'm gonna have to make a post comparing Jojo's Bizarre Adventure with itself.

Xibanya · # ¿ Jul 2, 2015 00:54

The art of Dragonball vs the art of Jojo Part II: The Point of Panels

What shape is this supposed to be?

This picture is supposed to make you see a triangle. How about this?

I'm assuming most (all?) of you were able to see a chair. You've seen a bunch of chair like this one before and millions of years of evolution have ensured that your brain is fine-tuned for pattern recognition. Fictional stories work the same way - you get some details and then use your prior experiences to interpret the details as a narrative.

So what's this?

Most will understand that this is a diagram of some sort because you've seen diagrams like the before, but will be unable to identify what this diagram is supposed to depict due to unfamiliarity with the subject in question. it's a small engine's carburetor

An unclear narrative is similar.

a story about levirite marriage posted:

A man's brother dies before begetting any heirs. The man marries his brother's widow. While having sex with his brother's widow, he pulls out before climax. God strikes him dead.

You have heard other narratives, so you recognize one when you see one, but this one just kind of seems like nonsense. This story has long been used by annoying people to claim that all kinds of harmless things are bad. But let's tell the story again the way the original audience would have understood it.

a story about levirite marriage posted:

A man's brother dies before begetting any heirs. As custom dictates, the man is tasked with the duty of providing his brother's widow with a son, who will be legally considered his brother's son, raising that son, and managing his brother's estate until his brother's heir comes of age. The man instead decides to steal all of his brother's stuff for himself. God strikes him dead.

With this context, the story becomes much more clear. The guy was a greedy dick.

Just asking questions

If a comic's clarity describes how easy it is to understand a story's events, intensity describes how easy it is to feel a story's mood. All else being equal, heightening a comic's intensity comes at the expense of that comic's clarity. The most common way this happens is via panel transitions. I'll use a sequence from chapter 159 of Dragonball to demonstrate.

What's Yamcha doing here? We have the requisite cultural background to understand that this is the depiction of a concerned man from the shoulders up, but it's impossible to say where the character is or why.

This is the panel that immediately precedes the one we just saw. We've seen enough cockpits or depictions of cockpits to understand that we're looking at one. So Yamcha is piloting a plane.

We don't need to see the back of the plane's cabin behind Yamcha in this panel because we understand that this panel happens sequentially after the previous one, so Yamcha must still be in the plane. Now we have enough context for a narrative - Yamcha is flying a plane. He looks down as he wonders why his radar fizzed out.

In this shot we see that Bulma is behind Yamcha and it is once again clear that they're in a plane. The narrative becomes - Yamcha is flying a plane. He looks down as he wonders why his radar fizzed out. His attention is grabbed when Bulma shouts and points at something ahead. We have to make the inference that Bulma was actually here there entire time, just not in our view.

This is a totally different view than the one we had previously - we now see an airplane flying toward an explosion in the distance as well as speech bubbles. Because we've primed ourselves to look for patterns that form a narrative, we link this image with the ones that came before it in sequence. This is the plane that Yamcha is flying, only now we're seeing it from the outside. The speech bubbles must belong to either Yamcha or Bulma, and the story now goes: Yamcha is flying a plane. He looks down and wonders why his radar fizzed out. When Bulma shouts and points at something ahead, he looks up and realizes that the interference was caused by a massive explosion.

Every time we jump from one panel to another, we have to figure out what's going on in the new panel based on what we've already seen. If the new panel doesn't show much in the way of scenery, more effort on the part of the reader is required for it to be understood. It follows then that all else being equal, the fewer times the viewing angle changes and the smaller any changes to the viewing angle are, the clearer the comic's story will be. Imagine that instead of four panels, we just get one like this:

Don't laugh, this happens all the time in mainstream comics. This entire setup is more clear - we don't need to make as many assumptions (in fact it would be more clear if I were doing this at home instead of at work and had redone the "shouting" speech bubbles.)

So why use this

instead of this?

The first is more intense. But why? It has more tension. By tension I mean it raises a question that has an interesting answer. The more uncertain and interesting the possibilities, the greater the tension. Pretty much any narrative is going to implicitly raise the question "what happens next?" but an interesting narrative narrows that down to a few enticing possibilities. So here we have a story-within-a-story.

The greater narrative is that Goku is locked in a battle to the death with King Piccolo, with the tension resting on the question "Can Goku defeat Piccolo?" When we jump in here, King Piccolo just unleashed an incredible attack at Goku. We then cut to this scene. A question is raised, causing tension, "What is causing the instrument malfunction?" The resolution to that tension (Piccolo's attack caused the malfunction) sets up even greater tension than before: "If Goku was at the site of the explosion, is he still alive?" "If Yamcha and Bulma are headed in Piccolo's direction, are they in danger?" "If Piccolo can create such explosions, how can he be stopped?"

Now consider this panel:

Many of you will recognize it, but let's try to look at it with fresh eyes. To understand it you have to first try to figure out what exactly you're seeing here - it's two fists meeting at the knuckes. The spatters of white-out (probably supposed to be blood?) imply force, so it's two fists punching each other. We have to use our knowledge of the series to understand that this panel shows the fists of Star Platinum and The World punching each other. Showing this moment with such an extreme close-up is much more intense than showing the same moment with a wider view since this view shows a forceful collision, but we have to think harder just to understand that this is a collision in the first place, and devoid of context it's not particularly meaningful at all.

With the previous panel next to it (now forming the entire page), it becomes clear that Star Platinum and The World have punched each other with incredible force.

The entire sequence goes like this:

If you had been following the story, you would know that the greater narrative is that Jotaro is locked into a battle to the death with DIO, and the overall tension rests on "Can Jotaro defeat DIO?" In this set of panels a minature story-within-a-story also plays out. By showing the extreme close-up of the fists, the viewer starts to wonder "Will The World overpower Star Platinum?" The framing of the aftermath guides the viewer to DIO's injured hand and then to his reaction, raising the question "Has Jotaro dealt a definitive blow to DIO?" Once those are resolved, there's even greater tension as we wonder "If even that can't stop DIO, how will Jotaro manage to survive?" on top of the still unanswered question "Can Jotaro defeat DIO?"

Imagine if it had gone like this:

The story hasn't changed, but far less tension has built up. The literal sequence of events is clear, but the story is less intense.

Using these sorts of panel transitions to heighten suspense has some drawbacks. Every additional panel forces the reader to figure out how this view is related to the one they just saw using what they've read previously, and change in viewing distance or angle place an even higher burden on the reader. If you have an extreme close-up and you're relying on the reader to have picked up a cue four panels ago in order to understand what exactly is being shown, you run the risk that the reader didn't pick up that cue and isn't going to understand.

You will find that Jojo's Bizarre Adventure uses a huge number of extreme close-ups and drastic changes in viewing angle, while Dragonball tends to use more establishing and medium distance shots.

As a result, Jojo requires more effort to read, while with Dragonball you can jump to pretty much any page and quickly get the gist of what's going on.

More panels doesn't equal more intense:

Much complaining has been made about "decompression" in comics, like this famous example:

It looks like western artists looked at manga and thought, hey, these Japanese comics sure have lots of panels where they don't do much! Japanese comics are popular. If we have lots of panels then our comics will be popular! Hooray!

But consider that in the panels from Dragonball a story-within-a-story is actually playing out.

Goku punched Piccolo really hard and he seems pretty hurt. Has Goku defeated Piccolo? No! Now he's close to Piccolo and has a broken leg -- he can't escape! Will he even be able to survive? How can Goku defeat Piccolo?

And think about these panels from Jojo:

DIO has stopped time and has dropped a steamroller (road roller?) on Jotaro. The steamroller is getting closer and closer to crushing Jotaro and Jotaro is frozen by The World's time stop. Jotaro actually looks terrified! How can Jotaro escape from this attack? Is this the end?

Whereas this set:

Isn't really raising any questions at all. Except maybe "What is Wolverine going to say?" which doesn't seem to be a question attached to particularly high stakes.

To sum up, adding more panels increases a story's emotional intensity IF they are used to increase tension by raising and answering questions. But decompression for decompression's sake is dumb. Don't do it, bub.

Coming up eventually: setting, anatomy, and violence

Xibanya · # ¿ Jul 2, 2015 14:39

Bad Seafood posted:

This post actually lead me to look up how long each part ran for, which lead me to looking up when other famous shounen series got their start, which lead me to throw this together because I guess I had the time.

A TIMELINE OF JOJO'S BIZARRE ADVENTURE

That's pretty handy, thanks for doing the research! Do you mind if I make a timeline image out of this (with credit to you on it, of course)?

Xibanya · # ¿ Jul 4, 2015 21:30

Diskin's Joseph reminds me of MasakoX's Captain Ginyu. I'm seeing interesting abridged series possibilities opening up here.

Xibanya · # ¿ Jul 22, 2015 22:29

If Boston terriers don't actually grab your face and fart on it, there is no justice in this world.

Xibanya · # ¿ Jul 29, 2015 03:52

Bina posted:

Deep Dream Dio

This must be the work of an enemy stand!

Admit it, Deep Dream wouldn't be a terrible stand name.

Xibanya · # ¿ Jul 31, 2015 01:29

Yeah story-wise I feel that if you're going to kill a major character you should have a pretty compelling reason to do so and the theme should point to that narratively. I read the last 20 or so chapters of Stone Ocean looking for effort post material (don't care 'bout spoilers) and I didn't feel like the ending had enough foundation in the story's thematic content - particularly when you consider the story "the entire series of Jojo up to that point." But I should really read all of part 6 before I make final judgement. At any rate, I feel like too many authors use the "rocks fall, everyone dies" ending because due to time constraints, burnout, whatever it's tidier than closing any hanging plot threads.

Xibanya · # ¿ Jul 31, 2015 02:03

Brannock posted:

Does this really happen? I can think of only a few examples where the story ended with everyone (or even most characters) dying.

Not anime specifically but this happens a lot in the lovely scifi/fantasy paperbacks I liked to read as a teenager. Notably it also happened in the Wolf's Rain OAV and I almost had a conniption. I want to say I saw this in some a few other animes because at the height of my high school anime mania I would watch anything just because it was anime. Now I'm a twentysomething with grinding work hours and little patience for mediocre entertainment so I only watch an anime if it's related to something I know I like or if someone recommends it. I always ask "so is everything they do rendered pointless in the end?" If my friend hesitates before answering, I'll probably pass.

Speaking of grinding work hours, I know I told everyone I had a massive effort post series on Jojo planned and then I apparently didn't follow through. Well I still have it planned but I have devoted all of my time in the last month to the SA Game Jam and the game I have been working on is hugely inspired by (and gently makes fun of) Capcom's Jojo. It goes live tomorrow night so check it out and see if I put my money where my mouth is when it comes to art.

Oh yeah and now that I'm thinking of it, weren't we going to do a let's read of Part 4? What happened to that?

Xibanya · # ¿ Jul 31, 2015 02:52

Prison Warden posted:

Yeah that was me... I noticed that a day or so after my first post no one brought it up again, so I just assumed lack of interest or everyone had done as I did and immediately blazed into Part 4 straight away.

I'm not that far in Part 4, hell, after the Game Jam I'll do it.

Xibanya · # ¿ Jul 31, 2015 08:04

Bad Seafood posted:

Anytime.

Have you considered throwing that stuff on a blog yourself?

Xibanya · # ¿ Jul 31, 2015 16:03

Naerasa posted:

I find this funny because it's absolutely true and yet his giant chest says he clearly spends every hour he's not gambling either at the gym or drinking protein shakes, like every other male until the twink supremacy of part V.

Men in Jojo are simply effortlessly beautiful. LIFTING: USELESS.

Xibanya · # ¿ Aug 1, 2015 09:56

I'm pretty stoked for the Battle Tendency dub. I might even buy it with money!

E: oh yeah, and as mentioned before, here's my heavily Capcom-Jojo inspired entry for the game dev contest! http://www.awfuljams.com/games/slam-fighter-ii

Xibanya fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Aug 1, 2015

Xibanya · # ¿ Aug 1, 2015 18:26

Beef Chief posted:

Gonna go ahead and skip around to certain episodes to hear other voices and deliveries, here's what I got so far.

Narrator - David Vincent
Dario - Steve Kramer
George - Marc Diraison
Jonathan - Johnny Yong Bosch
Dio - Patrick Seitz
Erina - Michelle Ruff
Speedwagon - Keith Silverstein
Zeppeli - ???
Bruford - Tony Oliver
Tarkus - Jamieson Price
Straizo - Dave Mallow
Joseph - Ben Diskin
Smokey - Robbie Daymond
Stroheim - Dan Woren
Santana - Kaiji Tang
Caesar- Bryce Pappenbrook
Wamuu - Paul St. Peter
Esidisi - Beau Billingslea
Kars - Christopher Corey Smith
Lisa Lisa - Wendee Lee

Oh my god Pappenbrook's delivery on Caesar is loving hysterical.

Don't you mean "SHIZAAAA!!"?

gently caress this is a real all-star cast. I'm pumped, dogg, absolutely pumped.

Also I'm glad you like Do�a Fulana. :spain:

Xibanya · # ¿ Aug 1, 2015 20:55

Well I don't wanna get pronated.

Xibanya · # ¿ Aug 1, 2015 23:50

That's not what your mom (Steve Blum) told me last night.

Xibanya · # ¿ Aug 3, 2015 06:15

So once I start doing long-rear end let's read posts of Diamond is Unbreakable, should I stick them here or in a new thread? Ideally we would have a moratorium on part 4 and beyond spoilers outside of tags but I don't know if there's the will to actually attempt to avoid spoilers.

And as for how far I am in part 4, I got to the point where they find out creepy monster dad is just trying to reassemble the family photo, which I'm pretty sure is not very far in at all.

Xibanya · # ¿ Aug 3, 2015 06:32

Bad Seafood posted:

Stick them in the Jojo thread for people who can't read good, which can be found here.

OH! MY! GOOOOD! I didn't even realize that thread existed. Well, obsessively working on a video game and checking user control panel only for a month will do that to you. Many thanks.

Xibanya · # ¿ Aug 3, 2015 20:46

Hey Bad Seafood, I was gonna send you a PM but it looks like you don't have plat. I'd be happy to add you as an author on my Effort Posts blog, and then you can clean up and repost your effort posts there at your leisure. As you can see I don't monetize the thing, so my only motive is really just to aggregate quality effort posts that interest me in one place. If you don't even want to bother with posting to Effort Posts The Blog, I'd at least like to repost your effort posts there with your permission so that at least I would know how to find them all collected in one place. Send me an email if you're interested: manuela.malasanya@gmx.com.

Xibanya · # ¿ Aug 14, 2015 19:15

Xibanya · # ¿ Aug 18, 2015 17:28

I use the viz app straight up on my iPhone, seems fine to me.

Xibanya · # ¿ Aug 20, 2015 00:00

Crossposting from the thread for posters who don't read good:

On Sunday I am going to be starting us off right with my take on the first three chapters of part 4. I won't always do "just" three chapters, but there's a lot to digest in these three as they lay the foundation for what follows so grab your favorite version of Part 4 and get ready, because Let's Effort Read JJBA Part 4 begins now!

And for those who aren't familiar with my style of analysis, you can see my other :words:

about manga here: https://manuelamalasanya.wordpress.com/effort-series/. The Let's Read won't be in the same format as The Anatomy of the Art of Dragonball, but those are the sorts of things I'll be commenting on in addition to the standard Let's Read commentary.

Xibanya · # ¿ Aug 20, 2015 23:39

I've had this avatar since I first signed up and now I'm itching for a change; also decided I don't care if people find out that I'm not a dude. I wanna buy myself a Jojo avatar though! Anybody got any good suggestions on ladies from Jojo that would look neato in an avatar?

Xibanya · # ¿ Aug 21, 2015 01:34

Bad Seafood posted:

How about this?

Hells yeah. Lisa Lisa rules.

Xibanya · # ¿ Aug 21, 2015 03:54

Whoa, somebody bought me a new avatar! Thanks, unknown benefactor! I will strike a pose just for you.

Lisa Lisa is a pretty rad character, particularly for a female character in a shonen manga from the 80s. What's kinda fun also about Lisa Lisa is that there are so many stories in fiction about someone training under some hardass mentor only to find out that the mentor was actually their father or something and then the story speaks to the unspoken bond of kinship and manliness between a father and son and blah blah blah but you don't really see much in fiction stories about a dude learning essential life skills from their mom -- and I don't just mean manga, I mean in any fiction. So yep, that's cool. And for that reason I don't mind Lisa Lisa getting injured just to let Joseph have a chance to go do main character stuff, because even if her character had been male, that kind of poo poo always happens to the mentor character.

E: grammar

Xibanya fucked around with this message at 06:05 on Aug 21, 2015

Xibanya · # ¿ Aug 24, 2015 00:13

Let's Read of Part 4 Chapter 1 up in other thread: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3729048&pagenumber=12#post449328430

Xibanya · # ¿ Aug 24, 2018 21:29

Some jerk totally plagiarized my essays https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPWhAnTfCkQ

the original originals are on these forums. The collected originals are here: https://manuelamalasanya.wordpress.com/

I asked him to take them down and submitted a youtube copyright notice, dunno what else to do. :ohdear:

I'm pretty upset. I put a fuckload of effort into those essays. Also if he'd just asked to adapt my essays into videos and credited me, I'd have been fine with it since I have zero interest in doing youtube stuff so if someone else wants to get youtube internet points off my work whatever, just don't loving steal it.

Adbot · # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 18:52

Xibanya · # ¿ Aug 25, 2018 00:41

EmmyOk posted:

That really sucks, Xibanya. Have you tried reporting on youtube?

unrelated

yeah I reported him, dunno how that will go. heh, yeah I could try to cause a scene in the comments but eugh. It's just so weird. It's one thing to have someone pass your work off as theirs, it's another to hear someone reading your opinions out loud in first person as if they were theirs. That's the problem with essays I guess, it's not like you can watermark text.