Hey, y'all, I wanted to let you know about a new group that  zero-shift has created,  jojo_furs ! It's a group dedicated to Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, a popular and long-running manga series in Japan. I've been a fan of Jojo for years, so I was really happy to see this.

What's so great about the series, you might wonder? Well, for one thing the art is enthralling and has a style far different from the usual anime look we've come to expect from manga. The creator, Hirohiko Araki, mixes odd poses, strange clothes, and weird but appealing color schemes to make an unforgettable blend.

Also, the writing definitely lives up to the title. The first two series were odd right out of the gate, with sexy muscular men learning chi arts to fight vampires in gory battles, but series 3 is when the strangeness really took off, when Araki created the concept of Stands.

Stands, in the Jojo-verse, are manifestations of a person's fighting spirit; they're basically the Stand-user's spirit existing as a puppet outside their body. Stands are only visible to Stand-users, and they all have amazing powers. But where in a normal series the powers would be standard things like telekinesis, energy blasts, telepathy, etc., in Jojo it's things like, the power to make zippers appear on any surface, or to deflate people like balloons, or to unravel one's own body into string. It gets incredibly weird as you have situations like a woman who can create stickers that duplicate anything they touch, fighting a guy that can summon invisible zombies.

One of my personal favorite things about Jojo is that unlike most stories about super-battles, intelligence and creativity are what win fights, not strength; I like to call it the anti-DBZ. In Jojo, people almost never win battles just by being stronger or learning a new powered-up state, they win by figuring out the weakness of other Stands, or using their own in a smart way. Stands that would sound weak in your average super-hero story are deadly threats because of their creative users. This keeps the battles and stories fresh and unpredictable, and the endings of battles rarely turn into an "I just attained another level of super-saiyan!" asspull.

So go check it out! There are some links on the JojoFurs page to where you can find the manga and read it for yourself, and I highly recommend it!