Jojo’s bizarre misadventure

ANN is reporting a bizarre little story about Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Publisher Shueisha and anime company A.P.P.P. have stopped shipments of the anime and manga because of an image that some Muslims found offensive. In the sixth episode of the anime, a character is apparently reading a copy of the Koran while ordering that another character be killed. In the manga version, the text in the book is unintelligible, but the producers of the anime used actual text from the Koran, which seems to have triggered the online protests. In their official statement, Shueisha and A.P.P.P. say that the anime producers didn’t realize they were using actual passages from the Koran; they just wanted something Arabic because the scene was set in Egypt. They apologized and promised to scrub the offending scenes as well as some fight scenes that included mosques. Breitbart.com has more details. The manga has been around since 1987 and the anime started up in 2001, so neither is new, but Breitbart notes that a pirated version with Arabic subtitles has been making the rounds since March 2007. I imagine the price of older Jojo items is about to skyrocket among collectors. (Image, which does not depict the Koran, lifted from ANN.)