JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Part 1--Phantom Blood, Vol. 1

Overview

The first volume of Phantom Blood introduces Jonathan Joestar, a well-meaning young heir whose comfortable life is upended when his father takes in an orphaned boy named Dio Brando. What should be a story of newfound family instead becomes one of quiet torment, as Dio's warmth toward the household adults masks a calculated, escalating cruelty aimed squarely at Jonathan.

Araki spends this opening installment establishing not a friendship but a feud, tracking how Dio's contempt for his adoptive brother hardens into something closer to obsession. Jonathan, for his part, absorbs blow after blow with a patience that eventually gives way, setting the stage for a confrontation neither boy can walk back.

As the first entry in a series that would eventually span generations of the Joestar family, this volume functions as an origin story in the fullest sense: it establishes the family line, the antagonist, and the emotional wound that ripples forward through everything that follows.

A Rivalry That Would Define a Genre

Phantom Blood arrived as an early entry in what became one of manga's most influential and idiosyncratic long-form sagas, and much of its later reputation rests on choices made here: the Victorian-adjacent setting, the operatic sense of scale, and Araki's insistence on rendering even everyday cruelty with theatrical intensity. Where later volumes in the wider series would introduce fantastical powers and increasingly baroque plotting, this first book is comparatively grounded, using a domestic setting to explore how resentment between two boys under one roof can calcify into a struggle that outlives childhood entirely.

The brothers' relationship also anchors a theme that recurs throughout the franchise: inherited conflict, where the sins and grudges of one generation are passed down to the next. Dio's fixation on Jonathan is framed less as a passing rivalry than as the seed of a multigenerational reckoning, and the book's closing note — that this is only the beginning of a long and bitter history — signals to readers that they are watching the first chapter of something far larger than a single school-yard feud.

Why Phantom Blood Has Been Challenged

A parent raising concerns about the volume in one district argued that its scenes of one boy's deliberate, sustained cruelty toward another were too dark for the shelf where the book had been placed, contending that the psychological intensity of the sibling conflict made it a poor fit for younger readers browsing a school library's graphic novel section. That complaint reflects a pattern seen with manga more broadly in schools: reviewers accustomed to prose fiction sometimes react strongly to violence and menace rendered in sequential art, where dramatic close-ups and stark imagery can register as more visceral than an equivalent passage of text.

Other objections have centered on the book's tone rather than any single scene — the sense that its depiction of malice within a family, and the escalating, unresolved nature of the brothers' hostility, is unsettling material to place in a collection aimed at adolescent readers without additional context. Records reviewed for this catalog show the title challenged in 1 state and 1 district, a narrow footprint that nonetheless illustrates the broader scrutiny manga and graphic novels have faced in school library collections over how graphic violence should be judged when it appears in illustrated form.