Well, they say the best way to see a person’s true nature is to give them power.
JJBA Chapter 291
Chapter 26 of Diamond is Unbreakable
Surface III
Translation: Invincible Trio
Surface continues its attack – it forces Josuke to dig even deeper at his eye with the pencil. Josuke’s response to this is pretty badass.
The writing here is a bit vague but I think that Surface is telling Josuke that he’ll stop his attack if Josuke promises to skip town with Jotaro. Otherwise I’m not sure what Surface is getting at here.
“Even if you struggle, you gotta give up some time, Josuke!”
Josuke struggles to keep from stabbing himself in the eye, and then apparently falls over.
I have to confess that to me the speed lines with the sound effect make this look a bit comical.
Josuke falls forward (spurting blood!) then falls again (?) as Hazamada has a private thought.
Hazamada discusses this most recent turn of events with Surface.
“Did you squash it?” Hazamada asks. “It made a nice sound. If he didn’t sever any nerves, he’ll be lucky to see again…if he’s lucky that is.” Invincible Trio, surely there was a more elegant way to word that.
“Well, he’ll be knocked out for a while, anyway…looks like we can get rid of Jotaro in that time. The name of the hotel that Jotaro’s staying in is…uhhhh…”
“It’s ‘Morioh Grand Hotel.’ Hey, pick up my shoes!”
Hmmmm interesting. So Surface appears to have a will independent of that of Hazamada. (I suppose perhaps it picks up the personality of whoever it is impersonating at the time? I wonder if it can even move when it’s not taking anybody’s form. Can it take Hazamada’s form?) Additionally, looks like Hazamada can’t actually see through Surface’s eyes as I had originally assumed – I figured he could use it for scouting like Kakyoin used Hierophant Green. And then Hazamada had to tell Surface to pick up his shoes, which would imply that he can’t control his stand through his will alone, although it does appear that Surface is obedient to him. So I’m wondering to what extent Hazamada can control his own stand. If he doesn’t give it orders in battle then how does it know what to do? Was Surface making Josuke stab at his own eye because Josuke had heard Hazamada made his friend do that so Surface actually picked the idea up when he imprinted on Josuke? So if Josuke hadn’t thought Hazamada would attack his eye, maybe Hazamada wouldn’t have attacked his eye. rly makes u think, doesnt it?
OK so I had to glance at this again because my first thought was that we were seeing a cross section of the inside of Surface’s head and that we were looking at machine parts – but then I realized we were seeing a sound effect that Echoes put on Surface (since Hazamada is also a stand user, why didn’t he see this?)
Posting whole page because the panel transitions are nice. We realize we’re surveying the scene from the POV of Echoes – and since echoes seems to be speaking for Koichi does that mean Koichi can use Echoes like Hierophant Green?
Also AIDS? wtf.
Hobgoblin2099
I was going to write up something profound about how this was a better outing for Koichi’s Stand abilities than the previous arc, but now all I can think about is that Josuke’s school apparently has a cabinet full of AIDS. 
But yep, looks like Josuke didn’t stab his eye out after all, Koichi just fooled Hazamada into thinking he did! (wouldn’t it be obvious because Surface didn’t stab his own eye out? I’m probably overthinking this.)
Bad Seafood
No because he didn’t actually stab his own eye out. Surface just creates an initial copy, it doesn’t mirror damage taken or anything.
But if it didn’t stab its own eye out then how could it make Josuke do same? If it didn’t make a motion that would cause that to happen, how could Hazamada think Josuke made a motion that would cause that to happen?
ChaosArgate
Josuke had the pencil, not Surface. As long as Surface’s hand moved close enough to its eye, it could probably be fooled into thinking Josuke popped his own eye.
Bad Seafood
Josuke “Stabbed” his own eye out with a pen. Surface wasn’t holding a pen, he just brought his fist up to his eye.
OH!
yeah I totally noticed that….I was just testing you guys….hahahaha…. 
LOOK A DISTRACTION!
Josuke rushes to Koichi and we get some expository dialogue explaining what happened.
So Koichi didn’t spend more than a moment with a zillion broken bones, he’s “just” sliced up from busting through a pane of glass. Looks like a job for Crazy Diamondman!
Something about this whole exchange is morbidly amusing to me.
Ahaaaaa so that’s why Koichi was a focal point of this earlier panel!!
MEANWHILE…
Dang if my tablet weren’t broken I’d be drawing lines on this shit. Oh well. Look at the lines and where they point and think arty thoughts! Also this panel is boring. BORING! Which is good. We just got out of a scene that was tense as fuck. Araki’s dialing down the intensity so he has the space he needs to jack it up again.
Koichi and Josuke talk about their game plan. Because of how thorough Surface’s copying was, right down to personality and speech patterns, they can’t think of anything they could tell anybody that would help them distinguish Josuke from Surface-Copying-Josuke. I guess Koichi forgot about the screw that he explicitly noticed in the previous chapter.
“What creeped me out the most wasn’t the face, though. It was the fingers…you see your fingers a lot more than you see your face, right? I could tell that he had me copied, right down to my fingerprints.”
“This is pretty damn bad…even Jotaro’s not going to be safe if that copy gets anywhere near him!”
You can tell Josuke really does believe Surface to be dangerous by how he’s sweating. Again this whole bit is kinda expository and not that exciting, but Araki is setting up the narrative questions from which the tension will rise: “can Josuke and Koichi get to Jotaro before Hazamada does?” “If Hazamada gets to Jotaro before Josuke and Koichi, will Jotaro be able to tell that Surface is an impostor?”
Josuke makes a beeline for the nearest phone booth – wow, after Stardust Crusaders looks like JJBA goes back to being a period piece! 
– and he dials the hotel Jotaro is staying in.
Side note: 
Curses, foiled again!
Koichi’s expression and placement in this panel cracks me up. Also, guys, how is this shocking? If Surface-as-Josuke can think of anything Josuke would and the first thing Josuke thinks to do is to call Jotaro, then it doesn’t seem at all surprising that the line is busy. Really at this point if I were Josuke I’d tell Koichi to start spitting ideas at me and then use the least bad one.
Still, this stunning revelation gives us this neato panel:
I really like the art here. This is just a damn cool portrait of Josuke being shocked as fuck.
Josuke asks Koichi how many other phone booths there are at school – OH I GET IT ‘cause for Hazamada and Surface to be calling Jotaro they would have had to place the call pretty much immediately after leaving the locker room which means they must still be on campus. Koichi rattles off a list of phone booths scattered hither and yon. Man so they could be all sorts of places. Upon realizing this, Josuke looks excited as fuck:
MEANWHILE…
Once again Araki uses a zoomed-out aerial view to establish a scene transition.
Surface-as-Josuke tells Jotaro to come to the Morioh Station ASAP, saying that he’ll fill in Jotaro on the details about another stand user he learned about from Kobayashi. Jotaro tells him that he’ll be there in 15 minutes. Surface hangs up and he and Hazamada exchange shit-eating grins.
Hey that’s pretty scary! At no point did Josuke or Koichi mention Kobayashi or the photo within earshot of Surface or Hazamada so I guess Surface was tapping into Josuke’s memories to come up with what he said to Jotaro. So in an indirect way I suppose that makes Hazamada capable of reading people’s minds.
And unfortunately Jotaro leaves before the real Josuke’s call goes through. Nice perspective/eye-guiding happening in that panel with the phone by the way. Man, none of this would have happened if they had cell phones. I’m now imagining Jotaro and Josuke running around with those massive vintage 1993-era cell phones that Araki had to have been aware existed at time of writing. Fan artists out there – you know what to do.
Josuke calls the front desk to ask them to look out for Jotaro, but Jotaro is already walking out the door by the time Josuke is able to speak to the concierge.
AW YISS KOICHI MAKING PLANS! Go get that copy!
MEANWHILE…
HA oh my this panel. Hazamada gothing it up while seeing all the girls cooing at what they think is Josuke. (Hmm, also his posture reminds me of the posture Surface first had after taking Josuke’s form.) I’m also thinking about Hazamada’s earlier comment about how stand users are basically better than other people. I read once that people with low self-esteem see the world as being full of people who are superior or inferior to themselves. Calling it now: Hazamada is insecure and before he had a stand he resented people he saw as more successful than himself.
Kobayashi, still skulking around for some reason (checking out the girls?) spots Surface-as-Josuke and Hazamada and sprits over to them.
I like how he’s eager to find out what happened. I wonder how much of that is from wanting more juicy gossip.
But wait!
AH!
Ahh yes some nice tense stuff here since you KNOW Kobayashi’s gonna get attacked so you just have to bite your nails until the comic reveals to you how.
Wait for it….
Check out that double chin. Hazamada confirmed for resentful loser.
MEANWHILE…
The girls from before spot Josuke and Koichi heading off campus. “Why are you coming out of school again?” asks one. “I thought you just left,” says another.
Ha ha ha, I hope this is as silly in Japanese as it is in English.
Postscript:
YF-23
About Surface having an will independent of Hazamada’s, I think about this that it might also be that Hazamada, being new to the whole Stand business, does not himself fully understand that he does not need to communicate with his Stand like it’s a different person. I think that might’ve been my initial reading of this back in the day when I read part 4.
Momomo
I thought Surface was just an automatic stand, and did whatever he felt like. Since Stands are like manifestations of the user’s personality, it’s just a way of showing Hazamada is really weird.
Agent Kool-Aid
surface introduces the concept that stands can sometimes have their own personality and converse with the users among other things. ultimately they’re at the whims of the user, of course, and can be banished or told to do things as the user wishes.
Davinci
What about Anubis?
ascalapha odorata
I started tapping out a long post on my phone involving that before the app crashed so everyone’s spared my garbage words but yeah, Anubis is similar but it’s not totally the same as Surface, right?
Surface is still actually tied to one entity, Anubis is a weird fuckin deal. Surface definitely sets up the possibility of Stands that have their own developed personalities. I mean Stands sorta had something like that thus far I think but not to a point where Star Platinum’s actually talking to Jotaro instead of just doing what Jotaro says.
Agent Kool-Aid
anubis is what it is because araki still didn’t know what all stands would be like. it’s a special case because technically it’s its own user. or something. i don’t know. surface is an introduction to how ‘normal’ stands can function like most others yet also have the ability to talk and whatever else. almost being their own character independent of their user, but only present when the user wants them to be around.
alcharagia
anubis’s user was a blacksmith who infused his stand into an evil murder sword and so the stand survived his death
Agent Kool-Aid
I personally don’t include the stands from stardust crusaders that much when talking about stands as a whole. Arc 4 is when the concept starts coming together and becomes integral to the series, and there’s even still some fleshing out in arc 5 from what I remember.
Aurain
Part 3’s Stands being pretty vanilla makes sense though. It’s never going to reflect too well against future parts with Stands because at the time the mere concept of Stands was a new thing. From the start of the part compared to a little later in, the concept of Stands changes from being a sort of extension of Hamon and requiring good breathing to function properly to them not being remotely related to it at all.
It’s quite clear throughout the entirety of Stardust Crusaders that Araki had these ideas mulling around for more interesting and dynamic stands and we do see some of these come to the fore by the end of Starust Crusaders, such as either D’Arby, Ice, Mariah, Oingo & Boingo, but it’s probably a case of it being too much to soon for those style of stands to be showing up from the very beginning of SDC.
Compare that to the beginning of Diamond is Unbreakable even up to the point where we’re at with Xibanya’s read through and we’ve got a protagonist who from the outside has a power besides punching things (and has turned a guy into a rock), Star Platinum with full access to The World, The Hand, Aqua Necklace (sort of like Geb+), Bad Company, The Lock, Echoes and Surface. They’re all wildly varied compared to how we see the first couple of Stands used in SDC because we all know what Stands are and the rules for them so it’s free reign from having it established already.
I see SDC’s pre-egypt Stands as largely dull concepts myself in the same way that Phantom Blood gets the same sort of “bad rep”. It’s not quite as good because it’s new, but it’s still pretty damn good anyway.
My favourite SDC stands are the generic punchghosts anyway (The World and then Star Platinum, personally) even having said all this. Simple is great sometimes.
RubberLuffy
The first three Stands we see in Part 3 are just basic psychic powers with avatars. Telekinesis, pyrokinesis and clairvoyance. You can maybe extend this to Kakyoin having possession/mind control even though that’s dropped almost immediately. It’s probably why they’re so vanilla, because I bet that was just the base idea that he moved away from pretty fast.
ascalapha odorata
I mean I always sort of think of it as “the guy who was manipulated and controlled by DIO might not wanna go for mind control anyway once he’s free” but just resent it when it’s said it’s utterly dropped because this always comes up when it’s being used as proof that hierophant green sucks. Which it doesn’t. 
Aurain
Kakyoin is the least good [Stardust Crusader]
Note: Aurain’s username currently displays as “Josuke Higashikata” and I’ve maintained it here as Aurain so that post attribution remains clear.
ascalapha odorata
Please fucking ban Josuke Higashikata
Waffleman_
He’ll just use Crazy Diamond to restore his account.
ascalapha odorata
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