JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Volume 8 Book

Going through this volume, I was still very much in the trough of disillusionment. With that in mind I, did not care of the conclusion of The Empress or the build up of The Fool. Introducing a Jo Doggo was weird and out of nowhere, but it's a dog so I'm not going to complain.

Once the boys get to dealing with a sound-sensitive enemy who is kilometers away, things get interesting. I've gotta shout out the coloring team, which really made Jotaro's blues pop against the tans of the desert. Araki's art has consistently improved with time, but the color team makes his work sing.

Avdol gets a moment to shine, but then his throat gets sliced. And again, I've got to question the point of giving characters such grievous injuries, only for them to be shrugged off by the time the next baddie rolls around a couple of chapter later. This makes Kakyoin's long-ish term injury feel weird, since we've seen the lads shrug off comparably serious damage.

Jotaro chucking the dog is one of my favorite moments from Part 3. It's simple and crude, but it's also the best solution given the situation. And then we get the sound guy's panicked inner monologue trying to make sense of the situation, which serves as buildup to the reveal that Jotaro is standing right behind him. As I've mentioned before, giving us more insight into the villains'mindset than the protagonist's is an effective way of making Jotaro's actions feel more intense and impactful. The reader is experiencing the same surprise and disorientation as the villain, followed by the visceral excitement of seeing a clever hail mary work.

Now we get to one of my favorite battles in part 3. Oingo Boingo is fucking hilarious. I don't know which one is Oingo and which is Boingo, so I will refer to each brother by their combined names. I mentioned before the idea of the crusaders suspecting that the work of a stand is afoot when the truth is that nothing out of the ordinary is going on. This is the opposite of that, where a stand user comes into play and self destructs without any of them realizing. The result is genuinely one of the funniest things I've read in manga. A lot of comedy is defying expectations, so Oingo Boingo's power is such a clever basis for comedy. It's a prophecy that a clown is desperately trying to make come true against a cascade of coincidences and bad luck. I really don't want to overanalyze this scene, so give it a read for yourself and have some fun.

At this point, I'm struggling to come up with terms to refer to Jotaro and friends. So, I'm going to have to go outside of the box from here on out.