Funny Valentine

Valentine cuts two very different figures across the story. He first appears portly and aging, then fills out into a fit, handsome, muscular man around the time he seizes the Saint's rib cage, a shift Araki attributed both to his evolving art and, jokingly, to the character having worked out; in the story it is framed as his serious battle body. Deep whip scars span his back in a pattern echoing the American flag. His pale hair falls in a series of thick, well defined ringlets that nod to the powdered wigs of early United States presidents. A smooth overcoat buttoned down his torso, frilled garments beneath, and gloves webbed with a net pattern round out his customary attire.

Above all, Valentine is a patriot, dignified in bearing yet ruthless in method, convinced that the United States must stand over every other nation. That conviction, rooted in his father's grim fate, drives him to chase the Saint's Corpse so its blessing can shield his country from all misfortune. He carries himself with cold politeness, favors formal speech, and even keeps a code of honor, refusing to kill Steven Steel because he swore an oath and admiring the Spin his enemies wield. A single genuine attachment surfaces in his devotion to his late father; toward everyone else, including his wife and his men, he stays distant and transactional.

Beneath the composure runs a streak of cruelty and hypocrisy. He discards subordinates without a flicker, killing them himself when it suits him, and he trapped a rail engineer halfway inside a mirror for a single advantage. His creed, summed up by the image of taking the first napkin, holds that power rests on authority and that one person's happiness must always be paid for by another's loss. He bends his own honor whenever convenient, lying and manipulating freely, and shows a genuinely depraved side in his assault on Lucy Steel, whom he means to force into bearing an American dynasty. Observant and calculating, he sees through disguises and studies every situation, though fatal overconfidence in the face of the Spin ultimately undoes him.

Funny Valentine is born on September 20, 1847 in Philadelphia to a family of faded British nobility. His father marches off to war and never comes home; a soldier named Captain Valentine later brings word that the man endured brutal interrogation and died rather than betray his country, along with a handkerchief bearing his son's birthdate that he had hidden behind a ruined eye. The boy takes the Captain's surname, graduates from Harvard, and serves in the Civil War, where capture and whippings leave the flag shaped scars across his back. During a desert dig near San Diego his whole company perishes on a Devil's Palm, and Valentine, collapsing onto the heart of the Saint's Corpse, is spared by its power and deduces that a full relic must exist. He marries Scarlet in 1875, wins the presidency in 1889, and, armed with a map that charts the scattered Corpse parts, backs Steven Steel's transcontinental race as cover to gather them all.

Throughout the Steel Ball Run, the President steers events from the shadows, dispatching assassins and Stand users to eliminate Gyro Zeppeli and Johnny Joestar while hunting the Corpse himself. His Stand, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, lets him slip between parallel worlds and swap places with his counterparts for a kind of immortality, provided he wedges himself between two objects. Once Lucy Steel manifests Ticket to Ride, that power blossoms into D4C Love Train, deflecting every misfortune aimed at him onto strangers elsewhere and rendering him nearly untouchable. He unmasks Lucy as the spy posing as his wife, keeps her close for the Corpse parts embedded in her, and in the climax slays Gyro. Johnny then activates Tusk ACT4, whose Spin flings Valentine into a pit with every dimensional leap. After feigning surrender and passing Johnny a healing spray for Lucy, Valentine reaches for a pistol smuggled from another world; Johnny goads him into the draw, both men fire, and the President dies at last. Word later spreads that his approval had climbed as high as ninety-one percent.