Johnny Joestar's race across 19th-century America picks back up this month. Netflix is bringing back the second part of Steel Ball Run, the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure saga that dropped a double-length special earlier this year and then went dark for six months while the production team worked on the next batch, according to Collider.

This is the seventh JoJo anime adaptation directed by Yasuhiro Kimura and Hideya Takahashi and based on the manga by Hirohiko Araki. The premise hasn't changed since the first stage: Johnny, who lost the use of his legs in an accident, teams up with the mysterious Gyro Zeppeli to chase a $50 million prize in a transcontinental horse race. What's new is the terrain. The duo now faces a 750-mile desert crossing where, per Collider's report, strange incidents start piling up fast enough that the race stops feeling like just a race.

Three new characters join the field this stage. Mountain Tim, Hot Pants and Funny Valentine all show up as the competition gets more crowded and, if the pattern from the first stage holds, considerably nastier.

One detail worth flagging: Collider's own piece can't quite settle on when this drops. One line in the report says the second stage premieres September 25, another says new episodes start Fridays from September 21. Both can't be right, and nothing in the reporting explains the gap. Netflix hasn't clarified either. Whichever date turns out to be accurate, the studio has said this run covers 11 episodes and will release weekly on Fridays, with a deliberate pause built in before the next stage begins, a decision Collider attributes to the production team's own wishes rather than a scheduling problem.

The wait clearly hasn't hurt the show's standing. Steel Ball Run is sitting at a 99% score on Rotten Tomatoes, which is about as close to universal approval as an ongoing anime gets, and fan chatter around the return has been loud in the run-up.

It's also arriving into a genuinely stacked Netflix month for animation. Stranger Things: Tales From '85 opens its second season September 17. One Piece gets a two-part LEGO special on September 29, the same day Mononoke's third film, The Curse of the Serpent, lands. For a platform that's spent years chasing anime audiences without always landing the tone right, Steel Ball Run returning to near-perfect reviews is the kind of proof point Netflix needed.

What happens next is straightforward on paper: 11 weekly episodes, a confirmed pause after, and eventually the remaining stages of Araki's saga still to come. Whether that pause lasts six months again, or longer, nobody's said. Netflix has committed to adapting all nine stages of Steel Ball Run eventually. At the rate of one desert crossing at a time, fans should probably not expect that to happen quickly.