Are you excited for more Jojo after the cliffhanger of volume two?! Hirohiko Araki sure is! He wants you to know that every sentence is important, too, or that nearly every word spoken in Battle Tendency is said at the maximum volume!! How can I tell?! It's all the exclamation marks!!! In all fairness, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is rooted in a combination of American comics and shounen manga, both of which are prone to exclamatory punctuation, so Jojo really does come by it honestly. But it also can make reading this book in particular feel vaguely exhausting, as if you're playing one of those children's games where you all just run around shrieking for reasons that aren't entirely clear, but no one cares because hey, you're running around shrieking. That's half the fun of this series, but it also can get to be a bit much at times.

While things have certainly been more serious than not throughout Battle Tendency, this is really the volume where the plot takes over. Volume one focused on reintroducing us to the Joestars and their associates, volume two was the training montage (so to speak), and now with time running out for Jojo to get the antidote from Wamuu before the ring around his heart poisons him and Esidisi upping the stakes by sending his brain and nervous system out to continue his work when his body perishes, things become much more fraught. As you probably recall, Esidisi had latched onto Jojo following their battle at the end of book two, and now he unwittingly gives the brain and nerves a lift to their chosen victim, LiSA LiSA's servant Suzie Q. Using her body, he steals LiSA LiSA's red stone and sends it off to St. Moritz, Switzerland, where Wamuu is waiting for it, while also putting Jojo and Caesar in the difficult position of freeing Suzie Q without killing her. This introduces the theme of sacrifice which becomes increasingly important in this book, and while they are able to work around it in this particular case, Araki uses that to lull us into a false sense of security as far as saving everyone goes.

This theme of saving and self-sacrifice is the clearest tie back to the first part of the series. Jonathan Joestar, the first Jojo, was a much more caring individual than his grandson, at least outwardly, and his entire life was arguably spent sacrificing himself for the sake of others and to stop Dio. Joseph doesn't appear to have any urge to follow in his footsteps, instead bickering his way through his training and flirting with any girl who crosses his path. Indeed, it is Caesar Zeppeli who appears to be more similar to Jonathan, and it is his role in this volume that serves as the catalyst for Joseph's change. The two go from being at constant odds to having a friendship that, if not precisely heartwarming, is very familial. Unlike Jojo, Caesar had a difficult upbringing, and not just because he was raised in pre-WWII Italy, although that fact does come up. Caesar's life brought him to a point of maturity that Jojo has yet to attain, and in the multi-chapter flashback, we see Caesar living through the phase Jojo is currently in. That and the image on the cover, which Araki explains at the end of the book, are both indicative of what's going to happen, and while we might wish it didn't, it really is necessary to allow/force Jojo to grow.

As is the norm, Araki's art is a mix of explosive weirdness, intense action, and bodies that defy physics and nature both. He has raised the fanservice content a bit, with LiSA LiSA beginning the book by taking a bath, and he has definitely improved his female bodies, although they still curve in bizarre ways, as if there were rubber bands beneath the skin rather than muscles. He has a tendency to draw both LiSA LiSA and Suzie Q with one hip raised significantly higher than the other, even when they aren't moving. Panels feel a little more dense than in previous volumes, and there is one scene towards the end of the book where it took me a good two minutes to figure out which appendages were Wamuu's arms and which were his legs (the text indicated that he had bent in half), which, while very Araki, is rarely a good sign. Fortunately he also has begun to experiment more with the orientation of his images and the colors in the color images (reproduced here in another gorgeous edition), which offers some welcome and interesting variations.

With one volume left, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency is racing towards its finale. Jojo himself is good and motivated now, to say nothing of having done some major growing up. The return of an unexpected character and the way the Suzie Q and Caesar's past plotlines are used have a major impact on what is to come as well as on Jojo himself, and Araki's more varied art techniques make up for some of his other artistic deficiencies. All of that almost pales in comparison to what Jojo's does best, however: serve up an insane plot full of massively muscled and overpowered people fighting each other in a ride that is as wild as the best rollercoasters. It's hard not to love a story that has so much fun with itself and invites you to play along.