What is Baoh, and who drew it?
Baoh, full Japanese title Baoh the Visitor, was serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1984 to 1985 and fills two collected volumes. Its hero, Ikuro Hashizawa, is a boy implanted with a parasite by a shadowy organization, which transforms him under stress into Baoh, an armored, blade armed being of immense destructive power. A young psychic girl, Sumire, becomes his companion and his remaining link to being human.
Read today, Baoh is the dress rehearsal for JoJo in almost every department: the sculptural posing, the lovingly grotesque creature design, the dramatic sound effect lettering, and a hero whose power has a visible, designed form standing over his human body, an idea Part 3's Stands would perfect. The tone is darker and more horror driven than early JoJo, closer to the body horror films Araki admired.
The series was short, cancelled before Araki could stretch it, but it had an afterlife: an anime OVA adaptation was released in 1989, and Viz published the manga in English in the 1990s, making Baoh one of the first Araki works American readers could own. That early English edition is now a genuine collector's item in the small Araki shelf.
In this hub Baoh is the bridge between the road in entry and the saga. A reader who finishes its two volumes understands where JoJo's bodies, monsters and poses came from, and why Araki, given a generational saga next, was ready to run one for forty years.
