JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: where to start? One entry point needs zero homework — and Netflix is rolling it out weekly this fall
The JoJo anime is nine parts deep and 191 episodes long, which makes "where do I start" a fair question. One of the answers requires nothing at all, and it's the one currently going out weekly on Netflix.
There are four defensible answers to this question and one of them costs you nothing. That answer also happens to be the series currently dropping a new episode every Friday.
Steel Ball Run is Part 7 of Hirohiko Araki's manga, and Part 7 is where he reset the board. It takes place in a separate universe from Parts 1 through 6, with only name echoes connecting them — a Joestar, a Zeppeli, a Brando, all rebuilt from scratch. You can watch it having never seen a frame of anything else, which is not true of any other entry point in the franchise.
What it's actually about
September 1890. A transcontinental horse race from San Diego to New York City, 3,800-plus entrants, a $50 million prize. Johnny Joestar is a disgraced former jockey who is paraplegic and enters anyway. Gyro Zeppeli is a Neapolitan rider carrying a technique called the Spin, which is the reason Johnny gets on a horse at all.
David Production is animating, as it has since 2012. Yasuhiro Kimura, Hideya Takahashi and Toshiyuki Kato direct; Yasuko Kobayashi handles series composition; Daisuke Tsumagari designs the characters; Yugo Kanno scores it. Shogo Sakata and Daman Mills voice Johnny in Japanese and English, with Yōhei Azakami and Kaiji Tang as Gyro. The opening, "SPIN," is by the Japanese band Kroi.
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The other three answers
- Part 1, Phantom Blood — chronological, 26 episodes shared with Part 2, and the shortest. It's also the one most often described as the weakest, which is an awkward thing to put first.
- Part 3, Stardust Crusaders — 48 episodes across 2014 and 2015, and the point where Stands, the series' whole combat system, get invented. Historically the most common English-language entry point.
- Part 4, Diamond Is Unbreakable — 2016, small-town setting, the tonal shift most people mean when they say they love JoJo. Assumes you know what a Stand is.
Everything from Part 1 through Part 5 ran as broadcast anime. Part 6, Stone Ocean, went to Netflix and ran from December 2021 to December 2022. As of March 2026 the franchise has 191 episodes on the board.
The schedule, and the mess that produced it
Steel Ball Run launched on Netflix on 19 March 2026 with a single 47-minute episode adapting roughly eleven manga chapters. It was widely praised. Then nothing arrived the following week, and the fandom concluded it was watching a repeat of Stone Ocean's batch-release treatment.
The response was a sustained meme campaign: review-bombing, Netflix's social accounts filled with doctored Johnny Joestar anti-piracy screens, and eventually brand accounts including Axe, KFC and Clash of Clans joining in to demand episode two.
"We are planning a split-cour release across the entire run of episodes. The next cour (2nd STAGE) will begin streaming in fall 2026 on Netflix, with one new episode released each week," Netflix Anime said on 6 April 2026, adding that the structure was the production committee's original plan.
2nd STAGE started on 25 September 2026, weekly on Fridays, 11 episodes. For the record: that first 47-minute episode sat alone on the service for six months and eight days.