Joseph Joestar

As an eighteen-year-old, Joseph stands tall at 195 centimeters, powerfully built with light eyes and short, dark, unruly hair that spikes outward at the bangs, otherwise strongly recalling his grandfather Jonathan. His early wardrobe is spare and practical: a cropped tank top, knuckle-studded gloves, fitted trousers on a leather belt, and boots that rise knee-high. A broad striped scarf appears in Switzerland, and Caesar later gifts him a patterned headband. The Joestar star birthmark sits on his shoulder.

By his late sixties in Stardust Crusaders his hair has gone gray and he wears a trimmed beard, keeping much of his old muscle beneath an Indiana Jones-style ensemble of fedora, light shirt, khakis, and gloves that hide the prosthetic hand he lost to Kars. At seventy-nine in Diamond is Unbreakable he has grown hunched and senile, leaning on a cane, peering through pince-nez spectacles beneath an ear-flapped woolen hat.

Young Joseph is hotheaded, brash, and quick to throw a punch, so combative that he had been jailed seven times and once expelled from school before the story begins. He respects little authority beyond his grandmother and later Lisa Lisa, taunts foes for sport, and is famous for predicting an enemy's next words. Above all he loves fooling around and loathes the very idea of hard work, preferring outlandish, showy schemes that catch opponents off guard. For all his bluster, he fiercely protects the friends and family he loves.

By Stardust Crusaders he has calmed considerably, shedding much of his aggression while keeping his knack for befriending locals and his goofy streak, which surfaces in his fumbled attempts to read menus or ride camels. This gentler stretch is shadowed by a fling with Tomoko Higashikata that produces Josuke, whom he abandons along with the mother, and by the lengths he goes to in hiding the affair from his wife Suzi Q.

Born to George Joestar II and Elizabeth, better known as Lisa Lisa, Joseph was raised by Erina alongside Robert E. O. Speedwagon under the belief that his parents had died, a fiction meant to shield him from the family's cursed history. In New York he befriends the pickpocket Smokey Brown before being attacked by the vampire Straizo, whom he destroys while learning of the Pillar Men. Following Speedwagon's trail to Mexico, he defeats the newly revived Santana with Stroheim's aid, then travels to Rome and meets the trained Ripple user Caesar Zeppeli.

The awakened Pillar Men plant deadly rings inside his body, forcing him to train under Lisa Lisa or die. He masters the Ripple, slays Esidisi, and follows the trail to Switzerland, where Caesar falls to Wamuu. Joseph avenges him in a chariot duel, then faces Kars, who transforms into the Ultimate Life Form. In a desperate final gambit Joseph loses an arm but sends Kars hurtling into space, and is later presumed dead until he crashes his own funeral, having married Suzi Q abroad.

Decades on, his Stand Hermit Purple manifests at sixty-seven when DIO resurfaces. He joins his grandson Jotaro on the journey to Egypt, where DIO drains him of blood before a transfusion revives him. At seventy-nine he visits Morioh, meets his illegitimate son Josuke, weathers a fresh Stand threat, and adopts an invisible baby he names Shizuka.