We Got up Early, Washed Our Faces, Walked the Fields and Got in the Turtle

You have to push creativity. Cosplaying is all well and good and very impressive in some instances, but you can always do more. This picture is from this very cool album. It starts off with the Part 5 characters in a band. I do like the image of Abbacchio with a saxophone, but the second half tells the progression of Part 5 done just with pictures of the Passione gang sitting around a card table in a gazebo. It’s well done even in the photography and the way the pictures become bleaker towards the end. Being set to PJ Harvey’s “In the Dark Places” from the Let England Shake album helps even it it does have the tritest Linkin Park lyrics pasted around the band pictures in the beginning. And there’s a fun bonus all the way at the end, so have some fun with it.

(Thanks to the post from konatsu612 Tumblr)

The Panacotta Fugo Experience. Purple Haze Feedback English Translation!

Get the English book here! There’s also a link at the bottom, but here’s the link if you’re just here to get it.

The past is never behind you. It is the building holding you up every day. You can feel the choices under your feet. When you’re determined and confident, your footing is solid, and you can stand proud and easy. When you’re regretful, your footing is loose, and you feel like it’s going to collapse and take you with it. You can’t change the past, and, thus, you can’t replace parts of the building. You can only build more of it and hope to reinforce the weaker parts. When a chance comes along to do that, to reverse a decision that haunts you, what do you do?

Purple Haze Feedback is a light novel written by Kadano Kouhei and illustrated by Hirohiko Araki that has now been translated into English by Buddy Waters. It functions as a sequel to Part 5: Golden Wind and stars Panacotta Fugo, the character most known for being written out of the story for being too strong. Fugo is called into service by Passione now lead by Giorno Giovanna, and also powerful enough to shut down events tantamount to the Super Bowl for meetings, and told by his Number 3 Guido Mista that he must seek out and kill a member of a remnant of Diavolo’s old Passione before that faction can flood the streets of Italy with the drugs they worked to get rid of. He is accompanied by GioGio’s bodyguard Sheila “E” Capezzuto and leader of the intelligence division Cannolo Murolo on his journey to answer a single question: “Why am earning my way back into Passione and not already standing at the side of it’s boss?” A single question that is the key to everything that makes Fugo who he is and what inside himself created his destructive alter ego.

When I heard about Feedback, I thought it was going to be very straightforward. “Fugo beats up the drug trade” sounds like a fun romp through JoJo’s to me. Give them some crazy stands to get some good fights, and we’re good to go. And it turns out that I was totally right. Purple Haze Feedback does have a very straightforward plot that doesn’t stray too far from that concept. There are little complications here and there that strive to make the most of the JoJo’s and Italian settings. There are parts that almost read like a tour guide to Italy, but always used in service of the scene and is only awkward for a moment. For instance, Team Fugo has to travel to Sicily at one point in pursuit of their target, and the narrative takes a moment to tell us about the Sicilian history of Nazis and WWII. You might be able to see where I’m going with Nazis and JoJo’s, but if you can guess the ultimate payoff for it, you’re reading ahead.

No, Feedback is a character driven narrative, and that’s what makes it shine. The story is largely focused on Fugo’s character arc, but each character around him is written to strengthen that arc while still feeling like full characters themselves, even the old Part 5 characters. Fugo’s meetings with Giorno and Mista go a long way in fleshing the two of them out. Mista gets some fun lines like, “I only survived because I’m a super lucky mega-nice guy born under a blessed star, but you didn’t have that to fall back on,” and his fear of four is driven to such an insane degree that he won’t even touch two because it’s half of four. Giorno appears only briefly, and sometimes the story does sometimes dote a little hard on him, but his ability to unlock the potential in others and make others want to support him is shown far more effectively than it was in most of Part 5.

And that’s just those two. A fair portion of the story is flashbacks to Fugo interacting with Bruno’s gang, including that fateful scene outside the chapel, and his perspective and inner monologue help give Narancia, Abbachio, and especially Bruno development as well. The new characters are done well too, mostly through effectively tying their personalities and personal histories to their stands, as Part 5 did, while keeping them interesting powers in fights. Angelica Attanasio’s Night Bird Flying, named for the B side of “Dolly Dagger” by Jimi Hendrix, allows her to make targeted people experience a bad acid trip on the spot as a reflection of her desire to force the pain of her crippling drug addiction onto others while using that to grasp even the smallest moment of the human warmth through understanding she so desperately lacks. Massimo Volpe’s Manic Depression, named for the Jimi Hendrix song, allows him to either make super drugs out of salt or to get so high he turns into Ron Perlman because his family crushed his life before he could do anything about it causing him to have no dreams or belief in the future. The stand designs are fantastic, and I don’t just mean the descriptions. Araki did good on the stand design, too.

That’s Volpe’s Manic Depression, and it’s legitimately the most unsettling stand design in the whole series while also managing to be a good reflection of it’s user. As a zombie newborn, it’s future is dead, exactly as the user sees it. And then the fights are still nice. Transition to mostly text didn’t stop the fights from being plan based and nicely visceral, so no worries about that.

I only have two real gripes with Feedback.  One is that the fanservice can feel a bit arbitrary. In particular, there’s a cameo from a character that feels like the author just wanted to have that cameo and came up with a way to justify it afterwords. It’s used to make a point effectively, surprisingly, but it’s still jarring at first. The other is that the language can get a bit flowery, so there’s descriptions that make you pause and laugh at the prose. The one that stands out the most is towards the end when Fugo’s inner monologue describes Volpe with, “With him, all paths lead to blackness in the depths of a bottomless
crevasse carved in the side of a glacier!” It’s honestly hilarious how overwrought that is, like the author, for a second, thought he may have lost you on that Volpe is a bad dude.

They’re small complaints, though. As a JoJo fan, Purple Haze Feedback is definitely an enjoyable read. I barreled through all 173 pages in one sitting without having to think about it, and that’s the highest praise I can offer. Buddy Waters did a good job with the translation, a spelling error or two aside. The language sounds natural, the Italian locals are identified effectively to make sure the names correspond to the right places, and it reads well. You can download the torrent for the English book here. Please enjoy it.

(Thanks to Frolic-Chronis Tumblr for posting the news and the torrent link)

“Why does my watch keep skipping ten seconds?” Vento Aureo Commemorative Watches

Time comes up a lot in JoJo’s from powers. Style too, though that’s not typically a power. So let’s combine the two. The Seiko Watch company is entering a collaborative project with LuckyLand and Araki to make a series of Vento Aureo commemorative watches each based on one of the main protagonist group.

  The Giorno Watch with the very nice Stand Arrow motif on the 12 mark.

The Bruno Watch with the zipper teeth around the subclocks.

The Fugo Watch with his gold and purple outfit color set.

The Trish Watch with the math operators from her skirt and from Spice Girl

Then we start to get to my favorites with the Mista watch with the Pistols on their numbers and bullets on all the others

The Abbachio Watch with the face numbers done in the style of Moody Blues’s rewind clock.

And finally the Narancia Watch with face designed to resemble the Aerosmith radar.

On top of all that, each watch comes with two special engravings: One on the back with Coco Jumbo and the name of the character for the watch, and one on the side that reads “Vento Aureo,” and they all come in their own special box. If you’re interested in purchasing a high fashion item, they’re dropping sometime in April for the whopping price of ¥42,000 ($436.86.) I don’t know if I’m down to throw that much money at it, but I’m really loving the design of that Mista watch. If you were interested in the 1/1 Stone Mask, this might also be something to consider.

(All images Copyright Luckyland, Shueisha Inc., Hirohiko Araki, and the Seiko Watch Corporation. Make sure to visit the official page for more information and the character art that goes with each watch.)

Natale Aureo, or Ogan no Christmas, or just Golden Christmas

I’m not great at paying attention. Did you know that JoJo Project was still around? I didn’t. They slowed down pretty hard towards the end of Steel Ball Run and then JoJolion was picked up by Hi Wa Mata Noboru, so I had assumed that they had just finished SBR and closed up shop. Shows what I know because they’ve been releasing updated scans for Vento Aureo since back in September. Look at how much better these look.

Before

After

Bad scan quality has always been a problem with JoJo’s, and we as fans are reliant on scans since it’s on shaky ground what can and can’t be brought over officially . The series had come into its own when we got talented scanlators on both SBR and JoJolion, but those old scans never really went away. I’ve seen people be skeptical or turned away from reading JoJo’s at all because they’d heard or seen how crappy the old scans looked. A retranslation is a great thing now that a whole new wave of fans is being brought in by The Animation.

But that’s not all. Cleaned up scans are great, but what about the lost effects like the full color pages?

The current Part 5 scans only have the colorless pages which I’m guessing were made for mass production tankoban or second hand Jump issues, but early Part 5 had color pages. JoJo Project got an old Weekly Jump just to get these pages that haven’t been seen since the original run in 1995. With the color pages now available, we can finally get the full experience of that weird ear thing Giorno does.

So go support these new scans. The newest volume just came out in time for Christmas.

OPJ Podcasts! “OPJ’s Bizarre Podcast – Part 5: Did We Just Accidentally Write JoJo’s Part 9?”

On the rise to become the ultimate Gang Star, the outfits will be more fabulous than you could have ever imagined!

JoJo’s Year continues with Hirohiko Araki saying “Fuck it,” and finally writing a story about Italy. Vento Aureo! Or Ogan no Kaze! Or Golden Wind.They all mean the same thing. See, JoJo’s is educational about languages and fashion sense.

Download it here!
Send questions, complaints, an requests for autographed body parts here!

ROUND FIVE

DIAVOLO

VS.

BRUNO BUCCELLATI

alsogiorno