My Burning Heart Trembles!

WARNING: Spoilers for Phantom Blood and Steel Ball Run below

Jonathan Joestar is the progenitor protagonist of both the Joestar bloodline and the Jojo's Bizarre Adventure series itself. However, he's often forgotten or else purposefully excluded from a lot of official and fan JJBA works. Some people even go so far as to suggest burgeoning fans skip Phantom Blood altogether. Well, excuse my French, but I think that's a bunch of bullshit. So I'm creating this shrine to both profess my love for Jonathan Joestar as my #1 anime husband as well as defend Phantom Blood's honor in the context of the greater JJBA universe.

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood is, in its broadest terms, an 80's shounen-manga-style interpretation of Dracula with a bunch of other English cultural and historical references thrown in for fun. Obviously, this means that Jonathan Joestar is more or less an anime Jonathan Harker, right? Well, it's a little more complicated than that.

There's the obvious differences: While Jonathan Harker spends much of his story being incapacitated or otherwise owned by the forces around him, Jonathan Joestar is an active shounen protagonist who physically fights pretty much every obstacle in his path. While Jonathan Harker is portrayed intentionally as a submissive and passive man, Jonathan Joestar is built like a brick shithouse and is constantly seen as a beacon of a virtuous kind of masculinity, etc, etc. But I think there's more to the differences Hirohiko Araki made from the original Dracula, both in story and character, that inherently change a lot about Jonathan Joestar to make him a more interesting and empathetic character.

The first and most obvious change is that in this story Jonathan and the vampire tormenting him are related. Or rather, the vampire is his adopted brother who makes his life a living hell from the moment the two meet. Spurred on by his not totally undeserved class-based hatred of the Joestars, Dio Brando proceeds to wreck everything he can get his hands on in Jonathan's life until the final page. Initially, this naturally infuriates Jonathan; Dio kills his dog, harasses his girlfriend, humiliates him in front of his peers, and generally just terrorizes him until Jonathan finally snaps and gives him one good punch to the dome. And then that's it! They're friends!

Yeah no I'm kidding. But there is an interesting aspect here that I think speaks to Jonathan's character: he only hits Dio once. Until the inciting events of their adulthood, Jonathan gets along with Dio perfectly well and doesn't seem inclined to violence despite it solving his problem. Even during the inciting incidents, he is hesitant to hurt anyone in order to get what he wants. Speedwagon spells this out in a goofy way, but he's also getting to the tenants of Jonathan's character that are the most charming to me: his empathy, his trust, and his ability to forgive.

With the exception of Jack the Ripper as an actual vampire (lol) and other minor Dio minions, Jonathan avoids trying to kill anyone unless he's outright provoked. When he realizes Bruford feels pain, he stops fighting him. He can't shoot Dio even after he's killed his father in front of him, partially out of an initial spiritual weakness, but also because he still sees Dio as his own brother. Even in the end, he cannot help but forgive Dio and consider him his brother and his friend. While a main staple of later JJBA arcs becomes outsmarting your enemies, Jonathan instead seeks to understand them.

A large part of Jonathan's character comes from striving to be a "gentleman", a term that in a modern context can come off corny at best and misogynist at worst, but my interpretation of Araki's use of the term stems more from the romanticized idea of knights and chivalry than any actual 19th century British interpretation of a "gentleman". The claymore-like sword Pluck he receives from the most honorable knight of Mary Stuart (lol) is a pretty clear example of this. Another aspect of this I find interesting is that Jonathan doesn't grow as a character until his house is burned to the ground and he finds himself basically outside of any semblance of proper 19th century British society. Until the end of the story he spends the majority of his hero's journey in the wilderness or in ruins of societies past. Jonathan's ideas of being a gentleman are fully developed surrounded by allies belonging to the "lower class". A bit trite? Perhaps, but here's where I think Araki starts to round out Jonathan's character.

Jonathan and Dio act as inverses to each other throughout Phantom Blood, and their conditions change constantly in relation to each other. Dio starts with nothing while Jonathan starts wanting for nothing, so when Dio attains an otherworldly power that makes him stronger he naturally uses it to take everything he can from Jonathan. When Jonathan completes his hero's journey he again shifts the balance of power and seemingly destroys Dio. At the very end of the story, when Dio returns as just a severed head, there is no way for him to put himself above Jonathan without first dragging him down to his level, thus his choice to fatally wound him. The two have finally met a true state of equilibrium, and here Jonathan's response is not bitterness towards Dio for taking everything from him—his father, his home, his mentor, his life, his chance at having a family—but instead a kind of comraderie. He understands their fate and thus doesn't begrudge Dio for it. Dio didn't ask to be born to an abusive father in poverty any more than Jonathan asked for his mother to be killed saving his life. There is a tacit understanding that two great forces coming from wildly different circumstances would be bound to clash, and the real tragedy is that these things were entirely out of their control before either of them were even born.

Jonathan's development and charm as a character comes from his inital naivete about the world around him evolving into a bone-deep willingness to protect it. These facets of his character really come through in Kazuyuki Okitsu's voice work as Jonathan in the 2012 anime adaptation.

Also he's huge. Have you seen the size of him? Good lord. Hoo mama.

So a lot of people seem to think Phantom Blood is worth skipping for some reason. Perhaps this is because the iconic stands don't appear for 2 more arcs, or people somehow find Jonathan "boring" despite everything I said above, so first I'm going to first outline some shit that happens exclusively in Phantom Blood that should be more than enough to convince anyone of its artistic worth:

• Someone is impaled to death on a statue of Aphrodite.
• Jonathan catches his love interest in one arm while simultaneously having his whole body wrapped in bandages like a cartoon.
• When a character's arm is frozen solid, Speedwagon melts the ice by pressing it against his steaming hot abs.
• Dire's Thunder Cross Split Attack, an attack perfect in both attack and defense that no fighter has ever been able to defeat.
• A vampire hides himself inside the corpse of a horse and animates it from the inside.
• For fun, Dio starts making minions that are cats with the heads of human men.
• "Space Ripper Stingy Eyes".

What more could you want?

I think some people's view of Phantom Blood is that it's simplistic, but I'd argue it's no more simplistic a story than Battle Tendency or Stardust Crusaders, the arc that literally turns it into a Monster of the Week manga. This is shounen, baby! You punch the bad guy real good and you win! Why are you reading a shounen from the 80's if you're expecting anything else!

A huge part of why I love Phantom Blood (and Battle Tendency) is it's my favorite era of Araki's art. Some people like to dunk on this era of JJBA art. Those people are fucking wrong. I'm going to showcase some of my absolute favorite drawings from Phantom Blood to show you what I mean.

Look at this drawing. I love this drawing. Making Jonathan's body into an X here is completely absurd, the two halves of his ass are like half a foot apart here, but you couldn't express the same force of energy and rage with an anatomically "correct" pose. It wouldn't be even remotely the same. The huge, extremely long limbs are the perfect for expressing the action of a hot-blooded 80's shounen manga. A lot of Araki's naivete and lack of knowledge about drawing in the early arcs actually inform him to make way more interesting drawings. Even though Araki becomes more technically competent as time goes on, I feel like his drawings have become stiffer and don't capture the same feeling or energy as some of these early panels. This might be one of my most favorite Araki drawings of all time.

This is another example of what I mean when I say "interesting drawing decisions". Jonathan's face being upside-down in the first panel is following through on the action of the previous page: Jonathan craning his head back to break the collar. Then, Araki uses the rest of the page along with the angle of Jon's pose in a really interesting way to emphasizes just how wide this dude truly is. Just look at him. God damn.

Anyways, a primary difference between Jonathan and Joseph's designs that gets lost in some of Araki's more recent drawings is just how bulky Jonathan is whereas Joseph is a bit more cut/streamlined in comparison to his grandfather. When Jonathan says he has a "tree trunk leg" he isn't using hyperbole. I could post more drawings, but we would be here all day. Suffice it to say the Phantom Blood manga especially is worth reading for these drawings alone.

So I hope you liked my shrine and it convinced you to read Phantom Blood/give Jonathan a chance as actually being a good Jojo. Plus it's also only like 44 chapters long, and that's the 20 page ones. The anime version's like 9 episodes long. Come on. You'd be a fool not to read it.

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