25 Days of Jojo’s - #1: Gyro Zeppeli

(Fair warning: there will be spoilers abound in this series of posts, as I find there are major moments that define some of these characters late in their respective story arcs. So in the event that you have not yet read/watched a particular part of the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure storyline, you may wish to skip over certain entries.)

#1 - Gyro Zeppeli: Prior to Steel Ball Run, there were two members of the Zeppeli family that played important roles in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. The first was Will A. Zeppeli, who served as mentor and to Jonathan Joestar during the events of Phantom Blood, teaching him the mystic arts of the Ripple. The second was Caesar Zeppeli, who transitioned from Joseph Joestar’s rival to his ally in the Battle Tendency arc. Thereafter, the Zeppeli family fell into obscurity, until the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure universe was rebooted in the seventh arc, Steel Ball Run.

Gyro Zeppeli fills all the roles of his predecessors and more, beginning the race across America as a man shunned from his home country of Italy for breaking from tradition and disagreeing with the particular rules associated with his family’s legacy as executioners. Gyro, though bound to the law by his societal role and bloodline, did not consider children to be deserving of such a violent fate, especially when there was a notable lack of evidence to properly convict them. Gyro appealed to the Italian government with the hope that he might spare the child in question from execution, and thus left the country to participate in the Steel Ball Run race as a show of his worth, skill, and conviction.

Cocky for the majority of his time racing across the country, Gyro’s gold-studded teeth and his taunting catchphrase of “Nyo-ho!” become immediately iconic. He is a force to be reckoned with, almost always placing near the front of the pack in each leg of the race, and forging rivalries with other racers Diego Brando and Hot Pants. He does, however, form a partnership with Johnny Joestar, which gradually results in them becoming strong friends, backing each other up in the most dangerous and intense of situations as they seek out the corpse parts in an attempt to stay one step ahead of Diego Brando and any of Funny Valentine’s hired muscle.

Gyro is also the source of a great deal of humor during Steel Ball Run. Often times, he will boast about his greatness and ask Johnny to back him up, only for Johnny to fail to provide the desired response, or Gyro will start a joke, which Johnny will offer a flat or overly serious answer to. The interactions the two share is amusing throughout, and solidifies their friendship as one of the most genuine relationships in all of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.

Which makes it curious, then, that Gyro also plays the role of mentor to Johnny, teaching him the art of the Spin, a skill Gyro picked up from his days practicing medicine. Though originally intended to provide healing and comfort to those in the infirmary, Gyro applies it as a combat tactic with his signature steel balls, flinging them at enemy Stand users with incredible precision. Johnny – slowly but surely – begins to master the Spin with his projectile fingernails, courtesy of his own Stand, Tusk. Gyro’s Stand, Ball Breaker, is not made visible until late in the story of Steel Ball Run, but lends to his incredible power and accuracy when flinging the steel balls, and amps his signature moveset up a notch, causing any living thing that his steel balls make contact with to age rapidly.

Despite his often less-than-serious demeanor, Gyro does briefly display a soft side when he decides to order a small teddy bear from a catalogue when camping out with Johnny one night. He is also a confident fighter, able to coordinate with Johnny, and change strategies on the fly. He instills confidence in Johnny during their time racing together, as they manage to overcome increasingly difficult odds. And though Gyro ultimately perishes during the climactic fight with Funny Valentine, he weakens the villain a great deal, and imparts upon Johnny the final lesson of the Spin, allowing Steel Ball Run’s hero to defeat President Valentine.

As with the two Zeppelis before him, Gyro dies before the major threat of his story arc is vanquished, but he makes it a considerably further distance than Will or Caesar, sees greater levels of involvement in his respective storyline, and has more compelling development as a character. Gyro passes on a hero, teacher, and friend to Johnny Joestar, and unknowingly influences some of the events that would follow between Steel Ball Run and Jojolion, the culmination of which earns him the number one spot among my all-time favorite characters in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.

25 Days of Jojo’s - #9: Johnny Joestar

(Fair warning: there will be spoilers abound in this series of posts, as I find there are major moments that define some of these characters late in their respective story arcs. So in the event that you have not yet read/watched a particular part of the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure storyline, you may wish to skip over certain entries.)

#9 - Johnny Joestar: The Steel Ball Run counterpart to noble and heroic Jonathan Joestar, Johnny Joestar begins his tale aligning considerably less with attributes of the former. Once a well-known horse jockey, Johnny’s ego got in his way, and a bad encounter with an impatient gun-wielder cost Johnny the use of both of his legs. This, combined with the accidental death of his brother, and the fact that his father swore that God took ‘the wrong son’ from him, leads Johnny to initially be a protagonist who is a bit rougher around the edges than many of his predecessors.

However, this culmination of unfortunate events also provided Johnny with a great passion for horse jockeying, offering him something to prove to himself. Forging an early friendship with Italian-born Gyro Zeppeli, Johnny quickly discovers that there is much more at stake in the cross-continental Steel Ball Run horse race than some fat stacks of cash. Hoping to recover the mysterious corpse parts before President Funny Valentine and his many henchmen can, Johnny and Gyro find that their role in the Steel Ball Run is one less of landing a strong finishing place and more of unraveling the larger picture, while also trying to stay alive.

Johnny’s Stand, Tusk, is one that certainly puts the ‘bizarre’ in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. It allows Johnny to fire his fingernails as projectiles, ten at a time, but manifests new abilities over time, not unlike Koichi Hirose’s Echoes in Diamond is Unbreakable. The more powerful stages of Tusk allow Johnny to throw up defensive walls, create wormholes to fire at his foes through from surprise angles, and even perform the Joestar bloodline’s signature ‘ORAORAORA’. While Johnny plays the down-to-earth pupil to Gyro’s eccentric mentor role in learning the Spiral, Johnny is also shown to be a fierce and highly capable fighter, sometimes becoming so intent on completing his goal that Gyro has to snap him out of his focus, so as to prevent him from pushing himself too far.

25 Days of Jojo’s - #13: Funny Valentine

(Fair warning: there will be spoilers abound in this series of posts, as I find there are major moments that define some of these characters late in their respective story arcs. So in the event that you have not yet read/watched a particular part of the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure storyline, you may wish to skip over certain entries.)

#13 - Funny Valentine: Funny Valentine is a man who very much buys into the philosophy of ‘he who dares, wins’. Introduced in the earlier volumes of Steel Ball Run, it is never particularly secretive that Funny Valentine has dreams of grandeur. His confidants are made well aware that the race, sponsored by one Stephen Steel, is essentially a cover for his search for the mythical corpse parts, something that has dwelled in Valentine’s mind since his days serving in the Civil War.

Initially appearing as a short, stout man, Funny Valentine is smart, laying back and allowing others to uncover the corpse parts he so desires along the race route. While racers like Johnny Joestar and Gyro Zeppeli appear more or less unassuming to him at first, their consistency with gathering the corpse parts and fending off would-be thieves and pursuers draws President Valentine’s attention. He first sends highly-skilled and highly-dangerous Stand users after the duo, and though they suffer more than a few scrapes and bruises during their standoffs, Johnny and Gyro constantly manage to best their foes, forcing President Valentine to perform a more direct intervention.

Funny Valentine describes his ideology at a dinner table, with all the plates and silverware set out properly. He explains how the first person to take the napkin on either their left or their right forces everyone else at the table to follow suit, lest they be left without a napkin – essentially, the first person to make a decision causes ripples on down the line, a practice which can be applied to any number of real-world scenarios. Funny Valentine believes that if he is successful in securing the corpse parts, it will secure his place as the most powerful man in the nation, and perhaps even the world.

While Funny Valentine begins Steel Ball Run with a generally average, somewhat stout build, his later appearances are tall and muscular, thanks to the dimension-hopping abilities of his Stand, D4C (shorthand for Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap). D4C is one of – if not the single – strongest Stands in the entirety of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, and its only notable drawback is that it cannot warp to another reality unless there is a fold between two objects within the immediate vicinity. In the middle of a field, Funny Valentine is a sitting duck, but in the streets of a city, the wheels of a carriage rolling along the pavement could just as easily provide him a gateway to a parallel dimension as could the front door of a building.

The other significant catch with Funny Valentine’s Stand is that, while he is able to swap bodies with other versions of himself to heal any wounds, anyone else that might attempt to follow Funny Valentine to one of these parallel realities will ultimately be drawn towards that reality’s version of themselves, colliding with said counterpart, and then being torn apart, ceasing to exist on both planes. However, to call Funny Valentine’s strategies cowardly would be inaccurate. When cornered by Johnny Joestar near the end of Steel Ball Run, he explains the logic behind his plan, as well as the extent of D4C’s powers, offering to bring the now-deceased Gyro Zeppeli back to life by swapping his body with that of a Gyro from a parallel dimension, so long as Johnny allows him to obtain all of the corpse parts. Johnny, however, does not comply, and uses the fully awakened form of his Stand, Tusk, to finish off the already weakened and pleading Funny Valentine.

25 Days of Jojo’s - #14: Lucy Steel

(Fair warning: there will be spoilers abound in this series of posts, as I find there are major moments that define some of these characters late in their respective story arcs. So in the event that you have not yet read/watched a particular part of the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure storyline, you may wish to skip over certain entries.)

#14 - Lucy Steel: Introduced at a relatively early juncture in Steel Ball Run, Lucy Steel’s story is one that requires quite a great deal of buildup to come to fruition. The teenage wife of Stephen Steel, the man responsible for organizing the horse race across the United States, Lucy Steel rarely leaves her husband’s side. And while it might seem at first that she is being portrayed as something of a helpless damsel, she has good reason for being so attached to her husband – he is, in a way, her savior, though he certainly does not display such an ego for his actions.

Prior to her marriage to Stephen, Lucy’s fate was all but sealed as becoming a prostitute for mafia members that her father owed money to. After receiving motivation from Lucy to capitalize on his dream of running a horse race that would ultimately become the Steel Ball Run, Stephen decided to intervene, convincing the mafia members that he had previously had physical relations with Lucy – something that, though untrue, resulted in her not being used as payment to them. Lucy grew fond of Stephen, and though he insisted that she would be better off finding someone her own age, eventually gave in and agreed to marry her.

Lucy stands behind her husband as a source of support and positivity throughout the early legs of the Steel Ball Run. But when she learns of the search for the corpse parts and the fact that the individual most desperately seeking them has little care for Stephen’s safety or well-being, she begins an investigation. Working in secret with Johnny Joestar and Gyro Zeppeli, Lucy manages to divert attention from President Funny Valentine’s assassins away from her husband, and eventually winds up in the presence of Funny Valentine, disguising herself as his wife Scarlet, with the help of race contestant Hot Pants. However, her disguise only works so well, as President Valentine discovers her true identity, but decides to keep her in his company, as she bears the final piece of the corpse he has been seeking – the head.

After President Valentine’s defeat, Lucy catches wind of his final, post-mortem play to have the corpse parts sealed in a vault in New York City. She follows the version of Diego Brando that Funny Valentine had pulled from another reality with the help of his Stand, D4C, and confronts him about his agreement to carry out President Valentine’s work. She then reveals that, wrapped within cloth, she holds the severed head of the original Dio Brando, and uses its close proximity to this alternate Dio Brando to destroy him. Lucy Steel proves a compelling and human character, which seems to be a prominent theme across the wider cast of characters in Steel Ball Run. She takes bold actions out of necessity as well as the belief in her own perceptions of right and wrong, all of which results in her undergoing a journey of self-discovery and reaffirmation in what she stands for.

Top 5 Stands in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure

Though the Ripple abilities harnessed by Jonathan and Joseph Joestar are the sort of ‘magical energy’ trump cards in the first two arcs of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Stands replace them from Stardust Crusaders onward. Stands are, in essence, a manifestation of their users’ willpower, and while the most iconic ones take on humanoid forms, their appearances can range from a small toy-sized fighter plane, to one powerful possessed sword, an electrical socket that forms a magnetic field around anyone who touches it, and even the collective consciousness of hyper-intelligent plankton. As is explained a number of times over the course of the long-running Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure tale, Stand users are the only ones who can see other Stands, and they will be inexplicably drawn to one another, be it on friendly terms or seeking to destroy one another. Below are my five current favorite Stands – as Jojolion is still ongoing and there will likely be more parts to Jojo’s in the coming years, this list may change in the future. Also, this list is based exclusively on the Stands, their appearances, and their powers, and the personalities or actions of their respective users do not necessarily bear any significant hold on their ranking.

#5 - Moody Blues: When part five presented the idea of a group of teens tracking down a mob boss and attempting to piece together the mystery of his identity along the way, Moody Blues stood out to me the moment its powers were explained. It allows its user, Leone Abbacchio, to rewind time and discover what transpired in a particular spot hours beforehand. It might not be the most exciting concept when compared to the Stands of the other Vento Aureo protagonists, like Guido Mista’s smart-mouthed revolver shells or Bruno Buccellati’s opening portals via zippers. Moody Blues is, however, quite practical, given the focus of their mission.

#4 - Whitesnake: Stone Ocean offered up many cool ideas that never quite panned out in quite as exciting a manner as I had hoped. It did, however, present some very cool Stand and core character designs, Whitesnake being chief among them. Enrico Pucci, Stone Ocean’s main antagonist, relies on Whitesnake’s ability to seal the memories and Stand powers of his foes on CDs in order to gain the upper hand on them. Whitesnake is present from a very early point in Stone Ocean, keeping tabs on Jolyne Kujoh, but often remaining in the shadows, carrying out tasks on Pucci’s behalf. It is one of the few Stands to display an ability to speak, and has a sinister, scornful personality that wonderfully matches its creepy subhuman face, its starkly-contrasting striped body, and the crown-like piece atop its head, denoting it as master of the Green Dolphin Street Prison

#3 - D4C: Considered one of the most powerful Stands in the entire series, D4C (shorthand for ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap’) allows its user and President of the United States, Funny Valentine, to slip between objects in order to travel to parallel universes. D4C’s powers are barely even hinted at until it makes its grand debut late in the Steel Ball Run storyline, but when it does enter the scene, it commands center stage, constantly thwarting Johnny Joestar and Gyro Zeppeli’s attempts to halt President Valentine’s visions of grandeur. D4C also grants Funny Valentine an immunity to the dangers of traversing the multiverse, as he is able to move back and forth freely in order to heal himself via swapping bodies with alternate versions of himself, which D4C will subsequently follow. Any other individuals who might attempt to follow President Valentine to another reality, however, will ultimately meet their destruction upon being forcibly pulled towards the other version of themselves native to that universe.

#2 - Silver Chariot: The Stands in parts three and four of Jojo’s generally have simpler designs and powers, which is by no means a bad thing. The goofball would-be-heroes of Stardust Crusaders all boast powerful Stands with specialized abilities that complement one another well, though my personal favorite – both in terms of its aesthestic appeal and mystical powers – would have to be Jean Pierre Polnareff’s Silver Chariot. Single rapier in hand, Silver Chariot is a simple enough knight in armor design, but its lithe build and lightning-fast jabs make for a fresh approach compared to the heavy-hitting, armor-burdened design that would have proved the easier route to take in designing a medieval warrior-style Stand.

#1 - Killer Queen: Another one bites the dust with each detonation of Killer Queen’s explosive powers. Killer Queen is the antithesis to the Stand of Morioh’s local hero, Josuke Higashikata’s Crazy Diamond. Whereas Crazy Diamond can repair any broken object, Killer Queen is gracefully destructive, leaving not a trace of any of serial killer and user Yoshikage Kira’s victims (save for their hands, which Kira keeps as companions due to his fetishistic m.o.). While most Stands have a set power level they will never surpass, Killer Queen continues to grow more powerful over the course of Diamond is Unbreakable, making use of fellow Stand Stray Cat to launch projectiles and Kira's eventual 'awakening' as a gateway to forming temporal loops to overwrite any mistakes in Kira's plotting. Killer Queen’s appearance is largely humanoid, completely white, with a feline face and decorated with small portions of purple leather and gold studs. On its shoulders, its belt, and in a few other places, Killer Queen bears a terrifying skeletal face that appears to be something of a fiendish mockery of its own face – an appropriate parallel to the smooth and beautiful exterior housing such a violently destructive routine.