Steel Ball Run — the seventh part of Hirohiko Araki’s JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure manga series — begins as a horse race across the continental United States and ends as a meditation on what it means to have a destiny, who controls it, and what a person is worth without it. The distance between these two things, covered across twenty-four volumes of manga (and the anime adaptation), is some of the finest sustained storytelling the series has produced.
Part 7 is also a reboot: it takes place in an alternate 19th-century America, with no continuity connection to the previous six parts. This allows Araki to approach his central concerns — the nature of will, the relationship between suffering and strength, what it means to fight for something — with fresh characters and a fresh landscape, while the American frontier provides a setting that matches the part’s thematic scope.
The Pop Score
Rating based on impact and craft.
Johnny and Gyro
The central relationship is the series at its best. Johnny Joestar — paralyzed from the waist down, self-lacerating, defined initially by what he has lost — enters the race because a chance observation suggests it might restore his ability to walk. He has no reason to believe this. He has very little reason to do anything at all at the start of the story. His arc is one of the medium’s great character developments: the gradual discovery of something worth fighting for that is not himself.
Gyro Zeppeli is Araki’s most complete creation. He performs not caring in order to protect how much he actually cares. He is technically brilliant, physically extraordinary, and emotionally defended in ways that the story systematically dismantles. His relationship with Johnny is not mentorship, not friendship exactly, but something more specific and harder to name — the recognition between two people that they are necessary to each other in ways neither fully understands.
The dynamic between them — the way their capabilities complement and their limitations illuminate each other — is what gives the race its stakes. You stop caring about the destination because the relationship is the destination.
The American Landscape as Character
Araki’s visual rendering of the American landscape is one of the part’s most remarkable achievements. Plains, deserts, mountains, swamps — the terrain is rendered with a specificity and grandeur that gives the race physical reality. The landscape is not backdrop; it is a participant. Different regions impose different conditions on the race, and the art communicates both the beauty and the hostility of a continent that does not care about the people crossing it.
Stands and the Part’s Metaphysics
Steel Ball Run introduces a new Stands system — or rather, a reframed version of the concept — that Araki uses to explore questions about fate and free will with more directness than the earlier parts attempted. The antagonists in Part 7 are not simply powerful — they have a specific philosophical relationship to the question of whether human beings can determine their own destiny, and the fights with them are arguments as much as contests.
This may sound dry. It is not. Araki is skilled at making abstract arguments legible through physical stakes, and the Part 7 fights are among the series’ most inventive precisely because each one is organized around a specific idea rather than simply around power levels.
Steel Ball Run (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 7). Original manga by Hirohiko Araki. Anime adaptation ongoing. This review reflects the personal opinion of the author.
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