No major spoilers beyond general JoJo setup.
Araki Hirohiko has talked about this directly. When asked about the origins of Stands, he points to AKIRA, specifically to something that bothered him about the way Otomo Katsuhiro depicted psychic power.
The problem wasn’t that AKIRA was bad. It was one of the most influential manga of the 1980s, and Araki knew it. The problem was specific: he couldn’t see how the power worked.
What AKIRA does with psychic ability
In AKIRA and in Otomo’s earlier Domu, psychic power manifests as visible effects on the environment. Walls warp. Objects float. Destruction radiates outward from its source. The power itself remains invisible: what you see is what the power does, not the power doing it.
This was the dominant visual language for depicting ESP in Japanese manga at the time. The ability exists inside the character. It reaches out into the world. The world responds. Readers understand a force is at work because the environment changes, not because they can observe the mechanism.
Araki’s complaint, as he has described it: the background distortion tells you something happened, but not how. The process, the cause, the path from intent to effect, stays opaque. You see the result. The reasoning stays hidden.
The invention of Stands
Araki also cited つのだじろう’s Ushiro no Hyakutarou, a horror manga featuring a guardian spirit visible only to its host, as another piece of the puzzle. The combination of those two influences, Otomo’s invisible power and Tsunoda’s visible spirit companion, produced something new.
What if the psychic power took a form you could see? Not just its effects, but the power itself, as a figure, present in the scene, acting in the scene, subject to the same visual logic as everything else?
That’s a Stand. The mental and spiritual force of the user, externalized as a humanoid entity that occupies space, moves through space, and can be observed doing both. When Star Platinum throws a punch, you see Star Platinum throw a punch. The mechanism is visible. The cause and effect are legible. Nothing is hidden behind a warped background.
Araki described this as making the invisible visible: taking the tradition of invisible psychic power that AKIRA exemplified and adding a step: giving the power a body.
What changes when the power has a body
This is the structural shift that Japanese manga critics identify as JoJo’s lasting contribution to the action genre.
If a character’s power is invisible, battles are largely about what happens to the environment and to the characters affected. The drama is reactive. If a character’s power is visible and embodied, battles become something closer to chess: two entities with defined capabilities, visible to each other and to the reader, moving through space according to rules that the narrative has established. The drama is strategic.
Part 3 of JoJo builds this framework explicitly. The “one person, one Stand” rule. The fact that Stand users can perceive each other’s Stands but ordinary people can’t. The rule that damage to a Stand reflects back on its user. These constraints turn every encounter into a problem with specific parameters, and the reader can follow the reasoning in real time.
This is what Japanese critics mean when they describe JoJo as establishing 知略バトル, strategic or intellectual battle, as a genre mode. The stand system creates the conditions for it. Without the visibility, without the defined capabilities, without the rules governing how damage works, the intelligence of the combatants has nowhere to operate. AKIRA’s invisible power is many things, but it doesn’t support the kind of battle where you can follow the thinking.
Why this mattered for everything that followed
The influence runs through the major action manga that came after Part 3 in ways that are visible once you’re looking for them.
Hunter x Hunter’s Nen system is the most direct descendant. Togashi Yoshihiro has spoken about JoJo as an influence, and the structural similarity is clear: each user develops an ability with specific parameters, battles are won through understanding and exploiting those parameters, and the intelligence of both combatants is as important as their power level. The logic is JoJo’s logic, extended and elaborated.
Naruto’s chakra system and jutsu also move toward defined, visible abilities with specific rules, though the power scaling elements push it in a different direction. The trend across action manga in the 1990s and 2000s toward systems with legible rules and strategic dimensions, rather than the pure energy contests of earlier work, runs through JoJo.
Japanese critics writing about this history use the phrase “スタンドバトルの元祖,” the originator of Stand-style battle, to describe what Part 3 established. The word Stand is doing double work there: it refers to JoJo specifically, and it describes the category of embodied, rule-governed ability that JoJo created and that subsequent manga built on.
Otomo’s shadow
AKIRA remains one of the great works of Japanese manga. Nothing about Araki’s observation that the power depiction was unclear diminishes that. What it does is locate the specific problem that Stands solve, and by extension, the specific gap in the visual language of psychic power that existed before Part 3.
Araki read AKIRA and found it extraordinary and also found something missing. The missing thing was legibility: the ability to follow the mechanism, not just observe the effects. He built Stands to provide what AKIRA didn’t, and in doing so produced a system that changed how action manga understood the relationship between power and strategy.
Otomo showed what invisible power could do. Araki asked what would change if you could see it. The answer turned out to be: everything about how fights work.
If Araki’s relationship to manga history interests you, this post on what Part 2 was competing against visually is the natural companion:
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