What do you think?
Rate this book
Steel Ball Run 2 in 1 #1
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Part 7--Steel Ball Run, Vol. 1
A multigenerational tale of the heroic Joestar family and their never-ending battle against evil! The legendary Shonen Jump series is now available in deluxe hardcover editions featuring color pages! JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is a groundbreaking manga famous for its outlandish characters, wild humor, and frenetic battles. Riders from around the world gather in the Wild West for the race of the century! Johnny Joestar, a former jockey paralyzed from the waist down, comes to spectate, and momentarily regains the ability to walk while watching a duel fought by Gyro Zeppeli. Desperate to learn more about this power, Johnny joins the race alongside Gyro and embarks on the most epic and bizarre race to ever cross the American frontier!
394 pages, Hardcover
Published May 27, 2025
64 people are currently reading
53 people want to read
About the author
Hirohiko Araki
650 books2,034 followersHirohiko Araki ( 荒木飛呂彦) is a Japanese manga artist. He left school before graduation from Miyagi University of Education.
He enjoys the baseball manga Kyojin No Hoshii (Star of the Giants); the video games Mario Kart and Bomberman; and likes Prince and other African-American singers, as well as jazz, rock, and rap.
He is a recipient the Tezuka Award for manga.
He enjoys the baseball manga Kyojin No Hoshii (Star of the Giants); the video games Mario Kart and Bomberman; and likes Prince and other African-American singers, as well as jazz, rock, and rap.
He is a recipient the Tezuka Award for manga.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
June 17, 2025
PEAK. This probably won’t be the only reread before the anime is released next year.
August 23, 2025
“This is the story of how I began to walk. Not in a physical sense, but in the way one walks from adolescence into adulthood.”
Steel Ball Run is Hirohiko Araki’s magnum opus. You can feel Araki’s confidence in this story brimming throughout every page.
Parts 1-6 tell the story of the Joestar bloodline in chronological order, each one adding more to the world of JoJo. Nearing the end of Stone Ocean, Araki felt that he had reached his creative limit. He had felt satisfaction from his work— and that scared him— believing JoJo had reached its natural summit was terrifying. He didn’t want Stone Ocean to be the end of his work, and thus, the following part started back at the beginning. A reset, and yet, a continuation of everything that came before. That is Steel Ball Run, a culmination of everything great about parts 1-6 and putting it into one phenomenal combination of new and old.
Steel Ball Run is Hirohiko Araki’s magnum opus. You can feel Araki’s confidence in this story brimming throughout every page.
Parts 1-6 tell the story of the Joestar bloodline in chronological order, each one adding more to the world of JoJo. Nearing the end of Stone Ocean, Araki felt that he had reached his creative limit. He had felt satisfaction from his work— and that scared him— believing JoJo had reached its natural summit was terrifying. He didn’t want Stone Ocean to be the end of his work, and thus, the following part started back at the beginning. A reset, and yet, a continuation of everything that came before. That is Steel Ball Run, a culmination of everything great about parts 1-6 and putting it into one phenomenal combination of new and old.
July 13, 2025
Hidalgo with balls. Long distance horse races: the stuff dreams are made of. Must read. Epic masterpiece.
July 12, 2025
It's everything that makes JoJo great: wildly eccentric characters, action that defies the laws of physics, and twists that are equally expected and unexpected. Not a perfect first volume, but still a very strong start.
August 20, 2025
Možda je do mene, a možda do kvalitete prijevoda. Sedmi nastavak u JoJo sagi je u isto vrijeme i reboot franšize, te radnja kreće od nule. Premisa je jednostavna, transkontinentalna utrka i vječna slava. Novi "gimmick" koji u ovom serijalu pokreće radnju je "sveto truplo".
November 15, 2025
Pocoloco is a better written character than the entire MHA cast and he basically stops existing after this volume.
September 30, 2025
I suppose I should begin this review by apologizing for skipping Parts 4, 5, and 6…but I’m not going to! I have every intention of reading Diamond Is Unbreakable, Golden Wind, and Stone Ocean once I am able to get my hands on these manga volumes. Since I was able to actually find this first volume of Steel Ball Run, I decided to read it in preparation for the anime adaptation coming in 2026. This will be my first time watching a JoJo anime after reading its manga, and I’m excited to have this different experience with this story in the future.
As eager as I am to begin reading Diamond Is Unbreakable and follow Josuke Higashikata around in Morioh, Steel Ball Run with its timeline reset back to 1890 and the big transcontinental horseback race is very exciting and fun, too! This volume is well-paced, I felt engaged and interested throughout reading, and more than ever before, I couldn’t begin to predict what would happen next in the story.
Steven Steel is the promoter responsible for putting the Steel Ball Run race together, and appears to be formidable and intimidating, at first. One of his employees tells Steven about some severe logistical problems due to more race entrants than expected, and Steven eventually relents, “All right, fine! You can have another million dollars! Just handle it! I don’t care if you have to quadruple our budget to do it!”
Steven puts up a tough front, but then folds immediately behind closed doors with his child-bride Lucy about his anxieties regarding the race’s success: “WAAAAAAAAAAAAH! What am I going to do?! I’m so scared!” And yes, you read correctly, Lucy Steel is all of fourteen-years-old and married to the much older Steven. This relationship gets explained somewhat later on in this volume, and while I cannot say that I find the explanation satisfactory, it makes as much sense as anything else does in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure as a whole.
The JoJo of Part 7 is Johnny Joestar, an equestrian prodigy whose once-promising career is cut short after he is shot in the back and paralyzed from the waist down. Johnny wakes up in the hospital and immediately encounters a mean orderly who tells him he has been abandoned by his father and wealthy friends, and forcefully shoves a rolled-up newspaper into his mouth. The best dark humor in this volume occurs during this moment, as the newspaper contains a headline about the Steel Ball Run race and the cheery tagline, “Race scheduled to start in just two years!”
Something inexplicable happens to Johnny’s paralyzed legs when he interacts with Gyro Zeppeli’s mysterious steel balls, and Johnny is determined to understand how these steel balls can potentially help him to walk again. Johnny is inspired to join the Steel Ball Run race himself, despite being dragged by his packhorse (with his hand hanging through the stirrup!) to the starting line, in order to earn Gyro’s respect and find out more about the steel balls’ power.
Gyro Zeppeli speaks plainly to Johnny when trying to discourage him about asking about the power of the steel balls: “Don’t get your hopes up for some miracle. I can’t fathom your situation…but standing up from that wheelchair was just a coincidence.” This hardly deters Johnny, who is used to this kind of talk when it comes to being a young man with paralysis: “The world told me to give up. Sometimes with words…sometimes with silence.”
Other notable racers featured in this volume include Diego “Dio” Brando, an “English commoner who was raised by a noble family,” Pocoloco, a farmer from Georgia who may just possibly be “the luckiest man alive,” and Sand Man, a Native American attempting the race “[…] on nothing more than my own two feet. They’re all I need to win.” There’s plenty of questions I have—Is Dio in this Part evil too, or just clever? What is the deal with Pocoloco’s hot steak of good luck? And WHAT keeps following Pocoloco around anyway?! None of these are answered, of course, but I expect some things to be cleared up in future volumes! I rate JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Part 7—Steel Ball Run, Vol. 1 by Hirohiko Araki as four-out-of-five-stars and look forward to Volume 2!
As eager as I am to begin reading Diamond Is Unbreakable and follow Josuke Higashikata around in Morioh, Steel Ball Run with its timeline reset back to 1890 and the big transcontinental horseback race is very exciting and fun, too! This volume is well-paced, I felt engaged and interested throughout reading, and more than ever before, I couldn’t begin to predict what would happen next in the story.
Steven Steel is the promoter responsible for putting the Steel Ball Run race together, and appears to be formidable and intimidating, at first. One of his employees tells Steven about some severe logistical problems due to more race entrants than expected, and Steven eventually relents, “All right, fine! You can have another million dollars! Just handle it! I don’t care if you have to quadruple our budget to do it!”
Steven puts up a tough front, but then folds immediately behind closed doors with his child-bride Lucy about his anxieties regarding the race’s success: “WAAAAAAAAAAAAH! What am I going to do?! I’m so scared!” And yes, you read correctly, Lucy Steel is all of fourteen-years-old and married to the much older Steven. This relationship gets explained somewhat later on in this volume, and while I cannot say that I find the explanation satisfactory, it makes as much sense as anything else does in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure as a whole.
The JoJo of Part 7 is Johnny Joestar, an equestrian prodigy whose once-promising career is cut short after he is shot in the back and paralyzed from the waist down. Johnny wakes up in the hospital and immediately encounters a mean orderly who tells him he has been abandoned by his father and wealthy friends, and forcefully shoves a rolled-up newspaper into his mouth. The best dark humor in this volume occurs during this moment, as the newspaper contains a headline about the Steel Ball Run race and the cheery tagline, “Race scheduled to start in just two years!”
Something inexplicable happens to Johnny’s paralyzed legs when he interacts with Gyro Zeppeli’s mysterious steel balls, and Johnny is determined to understand how these steel balls can potentially help him to walk again. Johnny is inspired to join the Steel Ball Run race himself, despite being dragged by his packhorse (with his hand hanging through the stirrup!) to the starting line, in order to earn Gyro’s respect and find out more about the steel balls’ power.
Gyro Zeppeli speaks plainly to Johnny when trying to discourage him about asking about the power of the steel balls: “Don’t get your hopes up for some miracle. I can’t fathom your situation…but standing up from that wheelchair was just a coincidence.” This hardly deters Johnny, who is used to this kind of talk when it comes to being a young man with paralysis: “The world told me to give up. Sometimes with words…sometimes with silence.”
Other notable racers featured in this volume include Diego “Dio” Brando, an “English commoner who was raised by a noble family,” Pocoloco, a farmer from Georgia who may just possibly be “the luckiest man alive,” and Sand Man, a Native American attempting the race “[…] on nothing more than my own two feet. They’re all I need to win.” There’s plenty of questions I have—Is Dio in this Part evil too, or just clever? What is the deal with Pocoloco’s hot steak of good luck? And WHAT keeps following Pocoloco around anyway?! None of these are answered, of course, but I expect some things to be cleared up in future volumes! I rate JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Part 7—Steel Ball Run, Vol. 1 by Hirohiko Araki as four-out-of-five-stars and look forward to Volume 2!
May 22, 2025
I'm still in utter disbelief that one of the best manga stories is finally out in English. A reboot of the JJBA series, in a new timeline, with familiar but different faces. A fantastic story that I can't wait to continue collecting.
Nyoho!
Nyoho!
June 29, 2025
finally rereading sbr, in honour of the anime announcement, and its just as good now as it was when i was thirteen. so, so dear to my heart
July 17, 2025
5 stars and yes i'm biased but i see zero flaws. not a single one. and if you do, you are WRONG! all these characters have my whole heart.
July 30, 2025
peak! never actually read all of steel ball run before so i’m excited to read it all. i love gyro fr
June 16, 2025
Series: Steel Ball Run #1
Rating: 4 stars - It was really good
Well this was interesting. This is the first time I have read Jojo’s but I have watched all of the anime that is out. Part 7 is a reboot of the whole series, which is good because some of the previous stands/ characters were getting a bit boring.
This introduction of Gyro Zeppeli and Johnny Joestar was very fascinating. Johnny is a former professional jockey, but was injured and is now paralyzed and uses a wheelchair. I liked his determination to get back on a horse and participate in this event. Gyro is still a bit of a mystery. He doesn’t play fair and has a very interesting ability with steel balls. Also the outfits in this are already wild.
The world for this Jojo’s is very interesting. It's set in the 1800s with horses slowly being replaced by trains and cars. The whole concept of a cross country horse race, that also apparently includes non-horses, is just very fascinating and captivating. I didn’t expect to enjoy this as much as I did. I am very captivated by this whole world and really want to know what is going to happen next.
Trigger warnings: Johnny was shot and paralyzed. He was also abused by a nurse while in the hospital.
*ARC provided by Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.*
Rating: 4 stars - It was really good
Well this was interesting. This is the first time I have read Jojo’s but I have watched all of the anime that is out. Part 7 is a reboot of the whole series, which is good because some of the previous stands/ characters were getting a bit boring.
This introduction of Gyro Zeppeli and Johnny Joestar was very fascinating. Johnny is a former professional jockey, but was injured and is now paralyzed and uses a wheelchair. I liked his determination to get back on a horse and participate in this event. Gyro is still a bit of a mystery. He doesn’t play fair and has a very interesting ability with steel balls. Also the outfits in this are already wild.
The world for this Jojo’s is very interesting. It's set in the 1800s with horses slowly being replaced by trains and cars. The whole concept of a cross country horse race, that also apparently includes non-horses, is just very fascinating and captivating. I didn’t expect to enjoy this as much as I did. I am very captivated by this whole world and really want to know what is going to happen next.
Trigger warnings: Johnny was shot and paralyzed. He was also abused by a nurse while in the hospital.
*ARC provided by Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.*
August 11, 2025
Such a great manga, I couldn't wait to finally get my hands on a physical copy, even though it's not colored (my first read). The characters, the storyline, the artwork...they pull you in and don't let go until you've read the entire volume in a maximum of two sittings. When the anime adaptation drops, it will eclipse everything that could possibly air at the same time.
If you haven't read a single thing about Jojo until now, I urge you to reconsider your life choices and get your cowboy hat on. Just kidding. If you ever had an unstoppable laughter when you saw something silly and bizarre on the internet, and you loved it, this is right up your alley. Throw in complex character development, unique artwork, and clever fighting techniques, and you'll have a wonderful time.
P.S. having a tailored Chemical Brothers Spotify list really lifts the experience and makes you almost a part of the race.
If you haven't read a single thing about Jojo until now, I urge you to reconsider your life choices and get your cowboy hat on. Just kidding. If you ever had an unstoppable laughter when you saw something silly and bizarre on the internet, and you loved it, this is right up your alley. Throw in complex character development, unique artwork, and clever fighting techniques, and you'll have a wonderful time.
P.S. having a tailored Chemical Brothers Spotify list really lifts the experience and makes you almost a part of the race.
June 27, 2025
Everyone who says that Steel Ball Run is Araki’s opus is correct. This story truly is a masterpiece, and I’m very glad it’s being printed in English hardcovers. However, I really, really wish they had kept the original font, those swoopy sweeping letters are infinitely more appealing and fitting than the lame sad blocky letters that are on this cover. I absolutely cannot understand why the decision was made to change the font so drastically. It’s partially because the cover looks disappointing, and partially because I’m kind of broke right now that I decided to check this out from the library rather than buying it like I did with my other favorite part when it was released in hardcover, part 4. Still though, I probably will eventually buy myself copies of this new printing, holding Steel Ball Run in my hands rather than reading it on a computer monitor feels so good.
September 28, 2025
1st volume of the English release combines volume's 1 and 2 of the original Japanese release. This allows you to see the set up for the race, and the first stage of the race in one volume which is flipping awesome. You get introduce to some of my favorite characters of all time like Gyro Zeppeli, Diego Brando (my butch lesbian), Poco Loco, Sandman, and of course Johnny Joestar. This is probably the best set up for a book series ever, it encapsulates the theming's of the story in just the first volume and allows you to get a good understanding of what the series is gonna be like.
December 23, 2025
Having exhausted the Stand Battle formula and every branch of the Joestar family by the end of Stone Ocean, Araki resets his magnum opus to the Wild West and the world of long distance horseracing. There are certainly still some magical twists, though largely still unexplained by the end of this first volume. While Araki is largely able to convincingly depict this equestrian spectacle with appropriate adrenaline, some of the panels get a bit too busy, and the exact effect of the mystical steel balls can be a bit confusing in manga form. Still, this has all the excitement of a racing story combined with all the weirdness of a JoJo.
July 19, 2025
This was quite an original manga! I’d never read any of the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure stories before this one, so I didn’t know what to expect. This was a fun story, with many horseback riders racing across the U.S. in 1890 for a 50 million dollar prize! The graphics were very detailed, but sometimes it was difficult to figure out what was happening with so much happening in each panel.
Steel Ball Run, Vol. 1 is an exciting manga!
Steel Ball Run, Vol. 1 is an exciting manga!
September 14, 2025
god is good, all the timeeee.
Araki is a genius, and i am so glad I'm alive to be able to read this in black + white, feel the stretch of each horse stride, and his double spreads r just phenomenal, absolutely breathtaking. I spent the whole first day once it came just staring at the front cover. i didn't believe it was real, n now its finished i might spend some more time staring at the cover, i think thats a gd use of my time whilst waiting for the next vol
Araki is a genius, and i am so glad I'm alive to be able to read this in black + white, feel the stretch of each horse stride, and his double spreads r just phenomenal, absolutely breathtaking. I spent the whole first day once it came just staring at the front cover. i didn't believe it was real, n now its finished i might spend some more time staring at the cover, i think thats a gd use of my time whilst waiting for the next vol
October 1, 2025
Nuevos personajes y algunos nuevo con caras conocidas. Las ilustraciones de Araki siguen siendo fenomenales. Sus personajes tienen características interesantes que desde los primeros capítulos dejan ver lo complejos que serán.
La frase con la que se presenta Johny es simplemente maravillosa.
"Esta es la historia de cómo comencé a caminar. No en el sentido físico, sino el el sentido en que uno camina de la adolescencia a la adultez".
La frase con la que se presenta Johny es simplemente maravillosa.
"Esta es la historia de cómo comencé a caminar. No en el sentido físico, sino el el sentido en que uno camina de la adolescencia a la adultez".
June 8, 2025
Bizarre, colorful characters who all dress like they're action figures. Intriguing premise that serves as a fresh start for series beginners like me. Art with a unique style full of unnatural poses and more speed lines than a ruled notebook. The main character is OP but I'm having lots of fun anyway
July 3, 2025
This is my first time reading Jojo after watching parts 1-6 as an anime. I had heard this was Araki’s magnum opus and even though it’s just the first 11 chapters, I can tell something great is being written. The art is beautiful as well. The cast so far has been extremely interesting with everyone having strong motivations for being here. I look forward to the next volume.
July 30, 2025
This was actually peak!!
I’ve been waiting for this to come out for ages and it hasn’t disappointed!! Certainly excited to see where the Steel Ball Run takes the characters but currently loving all who they’ve set up
I’ve been waiting for this to come out for ages and it hasn’t disappointed!! Certainly excited to see where the Steel Ball Run takes the characters but currently loving all who they’ve set up
August 13, 2025
I love the JJBA series, the characters in part 7 are fantastic and this reset universe is so refreshing and so unique. The art of course is incredible, I’m very excited to read the rest of part 7 of JJBA.
October 7, 2025
Fantastic a bit of a slow start mostly set up for character dynamics but done very well. Araki’s art continues to just get better. Reminds of part one with how much the supernatural elements are being held back.
May 31, 2025
I really love the art and story here.
June 2, 2025
I forgot how good Steel Ball Run is
June 8, 2025
I really like these hardcover editions, they’re made super well
June 24, 2025
A “song in celebration of humanity” with some of the most incredible comic art there’s ever been
July 18, 2025
Great take on a reboot and all the zanny wildness of Jojo is here. Can’t wait to see what messed up madness happens.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews