Battle Tendency

Battle Tendency (戦闘潮流), initially referred to as Dai Ni Bu Joseph Joestar: Sono Hokoritakaki Kettō (第二部 ジョセフ・ジョースター ―その誇り高き血統―), is the second story arc of the manga series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. It spans chapters 45 to 113 of the series, which were collected in Vols. 5 to 12 of the original Jump Comics edition.

Plot
The second JJBA series takes place in the 1930s, and follows the misadventures of Joseph Joestar, the grandson of Jonathan Joestar, as he fights vampires and ancient super beings with some help from a cybernetically-enhanced Nazi and an Italian man he has a lot in common with.

Joseph lives in New York with his grandmother Erina and seems to have inherited the power of the Ripple, as he has a natural ability to use it. When old family friend Speedwagon is reported dead (or missing) in Mexico, Joseph takes it on himself to go check it out. His curiosity is piqued when he is attacked in New York City by an old friend turned vampire. When he goes to Mexico he discovers a secret underground Nazi facility where the Nazis are trying to revive a man who seems to have been trapped in a stone pillar for 2,000 years. Here Joseph meets the Nazi Stroheim (whose character design is said by many to have influenced Capcom when they created Guile, though Dire from Series 1 also looks similar to him).

Unfortunately the Nazis are successful in awakening the man, who is christened "Santana" before he kills most of them. Joseph and Stroheim battle Santana and manage to defeat him, though Stroheim is fatally wounded.

Joseph then heads to Rome, where three more "sleeping pillar men" have been discovered. There, he meets Caesar Anthonio Zeppeli, a trained Ripple user near his age who is supposed to show him the ropes. Caesar Zeppeli is a descendant of Will Anthonio Zeppeli, who was the mentor of Jonathan Joestar. Caesar blames Jonathan Joestar for killing his grandfather with his incompetence. Before they can do anything besides arguing, they find themselves present when the three sleeping men awaken after their 2,000 year nap. These creatures are something like vampire gods; it turns out that they created the stone mask that turned Dio into a vampire. These three are named Wamuu, Esidisi, and Kars, and their goal is to find the "Red Stone of Aja", which, when used with a stone mask, will allow them to become ultimate life forms.

They are extremely powerful; untrained Joseph doesn't stand a chance. Luckily, he manages to talk them out of killing him. Wamuu and Esidisi both end up giving Joseph "wedding rings" which are internal time bombs set to release poison into his blood if he doesn't defeat them within a month. Joseph realizes that he'll have to train or he's going to die, and Caesar introduces Joseph to his master, the beautiful (and extremely talented) Lisa Lisa.

However, before the month is up, Esidisi finds out that Lisa Lisa has the Red Stone of Aja and comes to take it. Joseph uses his new skills to defeat Esidisi, thus earning the wrath of Wamuu and Kars (who previously thought of him as an amusement rather than a threat).

While on pursuit Joseph is reunited with the supposedly-deceased Stroheim, who has been rebuilt by Nazi science as a powerful cyborg, but Stroheim's machine body is quickly cut in half by Kars, who uses the "light mode" (a blade that extends from his arm spins so fast that it reflects light in irregular fashion giving the illusion of a glowing sword). In Switzerland the group discovers the location of Wamuu and Kars. Knowing Wamuu and Kars' vulnerability to sunlight, everyone is eager to face them during the day except JoJo. Caesar can't accept this and Joseph and Caesar fight.

Apparently Caesar's father disappeared during his youth, growing up as a thug hating his father, he later finds him. Caesar is eager to kill his father who has abandoned him, but to his surprise Caesar's dad didn't go out to enjoy himself. Following his father to the base of the Colosseum where the three monsters slept, Caesar tries to touch a gem that is embedded in the wall. To his surprise, his father pushes him out of the way and saves Caesar from the wall's trap. Caesar's father is quickly consumed by the flesh of the monsters in their dormant form and leaves a final message to him, telling him to inform Lisa Lisa that the three monsters in the wall will awaken soon.

Disregarding the warnings Caesar approaches the mansion where Wamuu and Kars are residing. Caesar is soon greeted by Wamuu and they fight. It appears that Caesar has the advantage as he nearly fries Wamuu with Ripple and refracted sun light, but Wamuu quickly counters his attack with his "holy sand storm" and Caesar loses his ability to use the Ripple. When Wamuu, satisfied with the victory, tries to leave, Caesar jumps up and tears out his lip piercing that contains the antidote to JoJo's poison ring. Before he dies from being crushed by a stone slab, Caesar uses his final Ripple to make a bubble out of his blood containing the antidote ring. Wamuu sees this but, respecting Caesar as a valiant warrior, he lets the bubble float away. When Joseph and Lisa Lisa arrive too late JoJo finds the bubble and vows not to drink the antidote until he personally has beaten Wamuu.

Joseph then defeats Wamuu in a deadly chariot race and the final showdown against Kars begins. First, keeping his promise, he fights the beautiful Lisa Lisa and though he promised to fight her one-on-one, he lies and sacrifices one of his weaker Vampires and is able to defeat her. Angered by Kars' trickery, Joseph then challenges Kars who looks upon Joseph as a weak Ripple user and not even worth fighting seriously. It all seems to be over in this fight against Kars until Stroheim (who has once again been brought back to life because of Nazi Science) and the Nazis, Speedwagon, and Smokey arrive to help Joseph. It is here that the reader also finds out that Lisa Lisa is the biological mother of Joseph. After using the powers of Ultra violet rays of light it seems that Kars has been killed and the world has been saved. But all is not as it seems. Kars was not only able to place on a stone mask that he had been hiding on his person, but fused with the powers of the Red Stone of Aja, Kars becomes the Ultimate Life Form. Now Joseph and the group are frantically trying to think of a way to beat this so called "Ultimate Life Form" and it seems that victory has once again arrived in Joseph's hands when he is able to send Kars inside an active volcano. But the fight was still not over. Kars was able to cover himself in an armor made of rock and protect himself from the molten lava. It looked like this would be the gruesome end of not only the Joestar's but the world itself, until the volcano erupts and sends both Joseph and Kars flying. Kars is sent into space and though he tries to fly back down to Earth to finish the job, a defense mechanism of his kicks in, freezing his body solid making him unable to travel back to Earth. The battle was finally over and Joseph was able to save the world from Kars' evil.

Weeks later the group of Erina, Lisa Lisa, Messina, Smokey, and Speedwagon pay their respects as they have a funeral for the assumed to be dead Joseph Joestar, but to their surprise Joseph wasn't dead! After falling back down from the sky he ends up in Italy where he is helped by some local fisherman. After finding and marrying Lisa Lisa's assistant, Suzi Q, he returns back to America to find his friends. He is annoyed to find that Suzi had not send them the message informing that he was still alive. After all the loose ends are accounted for and the lives of the characters are explained, Part 2 ends with the now aged Joseph at a Japanese airport which leads us to the next part of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

Characters

 * Joseph Joestar


 * Smokey Brown
 * A young boy living in New York. Joseph saves him from brutal, racist policemen, and he sticks around long enough to watch the battle against Straizo. He also shows up at the end of Part 2 with Rudol von Stroheim's cavalry. Smokey is initially shown with a pigtail in Volume 5, which mysteriously disappears in the rest of the series.


 * Erina Pendleton/Joestar
 * Joseph's grandmother. A character from the previous arc, Phantom Blood.


 * Robert E. O. Speedwagon
 * An ally of Joseph, and an old friend of the Joestars. Also from the previous arc.


 * Rudol von Stroheim
 * Stroheim is the commander of the Nazi forces who discovered Santana in Mexico. He is appropriately militaristic and menacing, but is also responsible for not only saving the life of Robert E. O. Speedwagon, but also for trying to help Joseph Joestar defeat Santana by blowing himself (and the enemy) up. He returns later as a cyborg to assist in the fight against Kars were he is sliced to pieces by Kars. He later returns again with a squad of Nazis to aid Joseph when an army of vampires tries to attack him. Later, when Joseph takes a plane to try and send Kars into a volcano, he saves him by jumping out the cockpit, breaking his legs as a direct result. He dies in 1943 in the front during the Battle of Stalingrad as a German soldier. He is the one who made Joseph's prosthetic cyborg hand.


 * Caesar Anthonio Zeppeli
 * The grandson of Will A. Zeppeli. He is a blond, suave ladies' man, as well as a skilled Ripple user. He was taught by Lisa Lisa, and currently lives in Italy. He is rather cool and collected, especially compared to Joseph, with whom he is grudgingly paired to fight the Pillar Men. But over time Joseph starts to grow on him so much he is able to understand his strange thought pattern. When Caesar was young his father suddenly left with no explanation. Because of this Caesar grew up hating his father thinking he was out living a new life. One day when Caesar spots him walking he tails him with the intention of killing him. Caesar spots a jewel not knowing that it was the activation of Wamuu's trap and his father pushes him out of the way, sacrificing himself for Caesar. This leads to Caesar going ahead of the rest of the group to fight Wamuu, where he meets the ultimate fate, but not before doing his fair share of damage and ripping off Wamuu's lip piercing, sending it in a Ripple bubble for Joseph before his body is crushed by a rock.


 * Lisa Lisa
 * Her real name is Elisabeth Joestar and she is the infant Jonathan Joestar saved at the end of Phantom Blood and gave to his widow Erina to raise. She was subsequently adopted by the Ripple user Straizo, and learned the art of the Ripple from him. As a young adult, Elisabeth eventually married George Joestar II, and they had one child. George, unfortunately, had no Ripple powers, and was killed by a vampire who had served Dio Brando. Elisabeth murdered her husband's killer and burned him to ash, but he happened to be a high ranking military official. In order to avoid retaliation, the Speedwagon Foundation helped her to erase all evidence of her existence. Under the name Lisa Lisa, she first appears as a mysterious Ripple user whom Joseph Joestar meets in Venice, but she soon reveals herself to be his friend Caesar Zeppeli's mentor. She trains Joseph in the ways of the Ripple and joins in the fight against the Pillar Men, as a powerful Ripple user in her own right. It is eventually revealed that she is Joseph's long-lost mother, despite her youthful appearance. She is gravely wounded in her one-on-one struggle with Kars, but manages to survive. She later tells Joseph her relation to him personally, at his own funeral. She eventually remarries.


 * Loggins and Messina
 * Ripple Masters as well as Lisa Lisa's servants. They trained Joseph Joestar and Caesar Anthonio Zeppeli in the Ripple for about 20 days, where they had to learn things such as how to breathe in for 10 minutes straight or how to breathe in 10 times in one second. Joseph Joestar and Caesar's final test had them in a Ripple match against their teachers. Joseph would fight Loggins, and Caesar would fight Messina. After a while, Messina forfeited his match against Caesar, astonished that in 3 weeks, Caesar had gained more Ripple power than he had in 10 years. However, Joseph was not able to fight Loggins because Esidisi had killed him before Joseph had got to the place they were going to fight at. So instead, Joseph fought Esidisi and killed him. Messina went with Lisa Lisa, Caesar, and Joseph to Switzerland to find the Red Stone of Aja. He didn't do much in the fights knocked out by Wham. After the final battle in which Joseph killed Wham and sent Cars into space, he attended Joseph's "funeral" and, just like everyone else, was shocked to see that Joseph was alive. His whereabouts afterwards are unknown, though he may had died during the 50-year gap between Part 2 and Part 3. Loggins and Messina are named after Kenny Loggins and Jim Messina, who were a pop/rock duo in the 70's. Loggins also had a successful solo career, recording hits like "Footloose" and "Danger Zone". It should also be noted that Jim Messina was a member of Poco; a band that also inspired a character's name in this series.


 * Suzi Quatro (Suzi Q)
 * The female assistant to Lisa Lisa. When she first appears she is taken over by the remains of Esidisi and attacks her own friends. But thanks to a combination attack by Caesar and Joseph she is saved with only minor injury. Suzi Q is a slightly ditsy girl and ended up marrying Joseph Joestar at the end of Part 2. Her daughter is Holy Kujo, meaning that Part 3 protagonist Jotaro Kujo is her grandson.


 * Wired Beck
 * A vampire with the ability to grow splinters from all over his body. He is quickly defeated by Lisa Lisa. When Beck spoke, he also overused the word "ok", placing it at the end of almost every sentence. Joseph's reaction to this behavior indicated that it was apparently very grating to listen to. Wired Beck is named after Jeff Beck, who had an album titled "Wired".

Pillar Men

 * Four powerful humanoids that serve as the main antagonists for the story arc. The Pillar Men came from an ancient race of humanoids that had extraordinary strength, intelligence and lifespan. This race once ruled the Earth, living at the top of the food chain and draining the life energy of other living creatures; this resulted in humans seeing them as variously gods and demons. However, Kars became aware of the potential of his people's brains, and aspired to unlock it through the Stone Mask, with which he hoped to make his people literal gods by destroying their weakness to sunlight. However, the rest of his race realized that if this were to result, the hunger that would result from the Mask's influence would result in them scouring the world of all life, and so rose up against him. In the end, Kars and his ally Esidisi obliterated their clan, save for the children Wamuu and Santana. The stone masks proved to be effective on humans, which can bring out their full potential through acupuncture. However they found that although the mask worked on ordinary humans (and would turn them into vampires), its stimulation was too weak for powerful creatures like them. They needed to combine the stone mask with the Red Stone of Asia to achieve their goal of evolving into "ultimate lifeforms". Unable to find the Red Stone of Asia, they transformed into stone pillars 2000 years ago and went into hibernation.


 * Santana (サンタナ) is, like his brethren, violent and aloof. He is discovered in a Mexican pyramid in 1938. He is then awakened and studied by a Nazi vampire study team in an underground base. The team, led by Major Stroheim, conducts live human experiments with the stone mask to try to strengthen the Nazi Army. The team awakens Santana in an advanced isolation room fortified with steel plates, and conduct behavioral experiments on him. They soon find that Santana feeds on vampires and is able to absorb food from the surface of his body. The team then is shocked by Santana's escape from the isolation room. Santana breaks many of his own bones in order to squeeze himself into the 4-by-20 cm ventilation outlet of the room, and does all this at a speed faster than human eyes can perceive. The team shoots Santana with machine guns, only to find that Santana has learned their language and the mechanisms of their weapons from only minutes of contact. He then easily disposes of the Nazis who disturbed his sleep, and even manages to stay alive after being attacked, exposed to sunlight, and blown up. He is named after the long-lived rock group Santana. He is the only member of the Pillar Men to survive, and is theoretically still alive throughout all of the arcs. However, due to his vastly-improved Ripple power, it is possible that Joseph killed him after returning to America.


 * ACDC (エシディシ) uses "the skill of fire". He raises his body temperature in order to heat his blood to 500°C. He then extends his blood vessels out of his body and makes them into long, prehensile needles with which he injects his hot blood into enemies, dissolving them from within. Even if the blood isn't injected directly, it can still eat through flesh and metal alike if sprayed on a target from the outside. ACDC has been shown to have an extremely erratic temper, sobbing at the sight of his own severed arm, only to calm himself near-instantly and replace it with the arm of Loggins. He himself stated that he has a more explosive temper than either of his brethren, and claims to openly express any rage or sorrow he feels so he doesn't lose his self-control. ACDC had traveled to ancient China and knew Sun Tzu's theory that "all warfare is based on deception". In his battle with Joseph Joestar, he tries to intimidate him by disabling Joseph's deceptive tactics. ACDC cuts the hidden rope through which Joseph plans to send Ripple energy to hurt him. Nevertheless, he falls for Joseph's more sophisticated deception, for Joseph has predicted his action and employed the cut-and-restore rope trick on the rope. His bones and muscles are destroyed, but his brain and blood vessels possess Suzi Q, who takes the Red Stone of Aja and sends it to Cars in Switzerland. ACDC then prepares to turn Suzi Q into a "blood bomb", planning on pressurizing his boiling blood until her body bursts, killing himself and Joseph's group in the process. Joseph and Caesar attack Suzi Q at the same time. While their Ripples cancel each other out and keep Suzi Q unharmed, ACDC is destroyed. He is named after Australian Hard rock band AC/DC.


 * Wham (ワムウ) is introduced as a servant to both ACDC and Cars. He is a very strong and honorable warrior who possess the power of the wind, and also reflexively attacks anyone who steps on his shadow. If he goes blind, he can grow a horn on his forehead and sense soundwaves with it. He can also draw air into his body and blast it through the tip of the horn, creating a highly-destrictive "wind scalpel". He is also extremely honorable, stopping himself from defeating a defenseless Joseph Joestar when he said that with a month to train he could beat Wham. Later on, he engaged in battle with Caesar Anthonio Zeppeli and killed him, but not before he managed to rip off Wham's lip piercing containing the poison within Joseph. In another display of honor, Wham allowed the antidote to stay where Joseph could get it out of respect for Caesar's valiant effort. Later challenging Wham to battle to avenge Caesar, they engaged in a deadly Roman chariot race, with Wham initially getting the upper hand. After Joseph managed to counter Wham's wind scalpel, he was left as nothing more than a head with the Ripple energy slowly killing him. After Joseph gave Wham some of his own blood to ease his pain, he used the last of is strength to destroy a group of vampires that attempted to kill Joseph. Wham then vanished in a gust of wind, with Joseph giving an unconscious salute to him.He is named after the 80's duo featuring George Michael, Wham!.


 * Cars (カーズ) is the leader of the Pillar Men. He is intelligent, ruthless, and single minded in his dedication to obtaining the Red Stone of Asia. Strangely, despite his apathy towards humans and willingness to kill them, he has been shown to be more compassionate for other living beings. In Switzerland, he sliced a car that was about to hit a puppy in half, and later on maneuvered himself during a long fall to miss a patch of flowers near the bottom of the cliff. Cars' power is that of light - he is able to produce bladed appendages from his arms and use these to reflect blinding light toward his enemies. He also has the same powers over his body that all the Pillar Men share. When he gains the power of the stone mask, he becomes invulnerable to sunlight, and also gains some abilities on a genetic level - he can produce living creatures and control them, and can mutate his body into various forms. He outlasts his comrades and eventually does gain almost unlimited power as the ultimate "evolved" man through the Red Stone of Asia and a stone mask. In a final confrontation, he succeeds in severing Joseph's hand but is eventually blown into space by a volcanic eruption as well as an ultimate Ripple attack from Joseph. Being immortal, he does not die; however he is unable to return to Earth. Trapped in the void of space for eternity, he eventually stops thinking and desires death. He is named after the 80's new wave group The Cars.