No significant spoilers.
Battle Tendency began serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1987. To understand what Araki was doing with the bodies in Part 2, Joseph, the Pillar Men, the whole visual register of that arc, you need to know what the rest of the magazine looked like at the time.
The muscle era of Jump
The mid-to-late 1980s were the peak of a specific aesthetic in Weekly Shonen Jump that Japanese readers who lived through it remember clearly. The dominant visual style for male bodies in action manga was massive, angular, and built around an almost geological sense of accumulated mass. Muscles weren’t decoration. They were the primary argument for why a character was dangerous.
The series running alongside Battle Tendency made this concrete. Fist of the North Star was in its final years: Kenshiro’s physique was essentially a map of every muscle group a human body contains, drawn at triple scale. Saint Seiya was in full swing, combining elaborate armor with bodies that read as superhuman through sheer mass. Dragon Ball was escalating through the Frieza arc, where power levels made the visual logic explicit: stronger meant bigger, bigger meant more dangerous.
And then there was Kinnikuman.
Kinnikuman had been running since 1979 and was one of Jump’s flagship titles through the 1980s. Its entire visual premise was the male body as spectacle: wrestlers with physiques that dispensed with anatomical accuracy entirely in favor of comedic and dramatic extremes. The Muscle series understood that absurd bodies were funny AND threatening simultaneously, that you could take a figure that looked ridiculous and make readers genuinely invested in its survival. This was not a minor presence in the visual culture of 1980s Jump. It was central to it.
Sakigake!! Otokojuku was also running in this period. Its vision of masculine bodies was different from Kinnikuman’s grotesque comedy: harder, more militaristic, bodies as instruments of extreme discipline. The male physique in Otokojuku communicated ideology as much as capability. These bodies had been trained into their shape by a specific set of values, and the shape expressed those values directly.
This was the visual environment Jump readers were in when Battle Tendency launched. The male body in action manga meant something specific, and multiple competing approaches to that meaning were running simultaneously in the same weekly magazine.
What Araki did differently
Araki had been developing his visual language throughout Part 1. But Battle Tendency is where the contrast became unmistakable.
The Pillar Men, Santana, Wamuu, Esidisi, and Kars, are massive in the way the era demanded. They are not realistic human bodies. But the tradition their forms draw from is different from Tetsuo Hara, Masami Kurumada, or Yudetamago. Araki was looking at Western classical sculpture: the proportions of Greek and Roman marble, the exaggerated torso of Michelangelo’s David, the Baroque sense that the body caught in extreme physical action was also expressing something about inner life.
The specific difference: Jump’s muscle aesthetic of the 1980s was about power that could be felt: mass as threat, bulk as danger made visible. Even Kinnikuman’s comedic bodies operated within this logic; the joke was partly that these ridiculous proportions were being taken seriously as vehicles of conflict. Araki’s bodies, even at their most extreme, were doing something closer to beauty. The Pillar Men are terrifying, but they’re also presented as aesthetically extraordinary. The panels linger on their forms the way they would linger on a sculpture. The reader is meant to find them impressive in a register that includes but goes beyond the purely physical.
Joseph Joestar himself is the counterpoint to all of this. He’s muscular in the way an athlete is muscular: functional, proportionate, capable without being architecturally overwhelming. Placed against the Pillar Men, and placed within the visual context of a magazine containing Kinnikuman, Fist of the North Star, and Saint Seiya, Joseph reads as a human being fighting things that aren’t quite human. The scale contrast is deliberate and works precisely because of that context.
What Japanese readers of that era saw
Japanese readers buying Jump weekly in 1987 and 1988 were encountering Battle Tendency alongside the final arcs of Fist of the North Star, the middle runs of Saint Seiya and Kinnikuman, and the ongoing escalation of Dragon Ball. Otokojuku was there too, with its entirely different relationship to what a trained male body signified.
What those readers describe when they talk about the Part 2 art: it looked different. Not better or worse necessarily, but operating by different rules. The Pillar Men didn’t look like Kenshiro or Terryman or Ryuuji Danno. They looked like they’d come from somewhere else, some other visual tradition that shared the language of extreme physical form but was saying something different with it.
Araki has talked about this across various interviews: his conscious reference to Western art history, his interest in making manga that didn’t look like other manga. In the context of 1987 Jump, that ambition was visible in real time. Readers who were there noticed something different was happening on those pages, even when they couldn’t immediately name what the difference was.
I was too young to read Jump in 1987. But I grew up with readers who were there, and the way they describe encountering Part 2 for the first time is consistent: something about those bodies felt imported from somewhere outside the magazine’s visual universe. That feeling had a source, and the source was exactly this: Araki drawing from sculpture and fashion photography in a magazine full of bodies built according to entirely different rules.
Why this matters for understanding JoJo
The muscle aesthetic of 1980s Jump was an aesthetic of legibility. Big means strong. Strong means dangerous. Kinnikuman complicated this with comedy. Otokojuku complicated it with ideology. But the underlying logic held across all of them: the body communicates its capabilities directly through its mass and proportions.
Araki’s bodies don’t fully work this way. Dio in Part 1 is slender, which in the visual language of his contemporaries would suggest weakness. He’s terrifying for different reasons: the intelligence, the cruelty, the self-certainty visible in his posture. The body doesn’t carry the threat information directly. Something else does.
This shift, from bodies that communicate power through mass to bodies that communicate character through pose and proportion, that is one of JoJo’s foundational visual moves. It happened in direct conversation with a specific moment in Jump’s history, surrounded by some of the most extreme muscle aesthetics that manga has ever produced. Araki wasn’t rejecting what Hara, Kurumada, and Yudetamago were doing. He was working in the same space with different references, and the difference turned out to be one of the things that made JoJo look like nothing else on the stands.
If the visual contrast between Araki and his contemporaries interests you, this post covers the system he built to replace raw power:
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