Lisa Lisa

Lisa Lisa (リサリサ) is a character primarily featured in Part II: Battle Tendency, who also appears briefly at the end of Part I: Phantom Blood. She is Caesar Anthonio Zeppeli's mentor and Joseph Joestar's mother.

Phantom Blood
Elizabeth Joestar was a baby present in the boat attacked by Dio Brando at the end of series 1. After her mother died by a zombie attack Jonathan Joestar saved and gave her to his widow Erina to raise.

Post-Phantom Blood
She was subsequently adopted by the Ripple user Straizo, and learned the art of Ripple from him until her 18th birthday. As a young adult, Elizabeth eventually married George Joestar II, and they had one child. George, unfortunately, had no Ripple powers, and was killed by a zombie who had served Dio Brando. Elizabeth murdered her husband's killer and burned him to ash, but he happened to be a high-ranking military official. In order to avoid retaliation, the Speedwagon Foundation helped her to erase all evidence of her existence.

Battle Tendency (1938-39)
Under the name Lisa Lisa, she first appears as a mysterious Ripple user whom Joseph meets in Venice.

She soon reveals herself to be Caesar's mentor and trains Joseph in the ways of The Ripple (starting off by giving him a mask to modify his breathing and hitting him in the head with an oar) before joining in the fight against The Pillar Men as a powerful Ripple user in her own right.

She's shown to have the Red Stone of Aja and mentions that destroying it would make fighting The Pillar Men just that much more difficult hence why she keeps it on her person. She is also the one who defeats Wired Beck.

It is eventually revealed that she is Joseph's long-lost mother, despite her youthful appearance. She is gravely wounded in her one-on-one struggle with Kars, tricked by him with a double & literally stabs her in the back with one of his light blades, but manages to survive. She later tells Joseph her relation to him personally, at Caeser's funeral. She eventually remarries to a Hollywood screen writer.

Stardust Crusaders
It is mentioned that Joseph talked to her about the Joestar birthmark right after discovering Dio's resurrection, putting her in her mid-to-late 90's by a presumed time of her death.

Abilities
Lisa Lisa is a skilled ripple master, trained by Tonpetty's succesor Straizo himself. Her unorthodox methods of training result in her students becoming Ripple Masters themselves in a short amount of time. She was shown capable of channeling her ripple into an oar floating on water without any indication of sinking. Her primary method of fighting involves a scarf made with the yarn of an insect called Sathiphorosia Scaraba, which can conduct the ripple at 100%.


 * Snake Muffler: Lisa Lisa channels her ripple through her scarf to stand upside down, using the now rigid scarf as the only thing making contact with the ground. She then uses the scarf to detect life signs. With this she's able to tell where an attack comes from, even if its out of her sight, but may not detect an attack if she's distracted by something else.

Trivia

 * Araki personally admits that he's fond of female characters who are capable of fighting for themselves. He commented on his intents to have Lisa Lisa portrayed with "uncommon realism" for women in shounen comics, but he was held back from going as far as he would have liked with her.
 * Iku Nagae from Touhou Project fights with a scarf that emits (electric) sparks, this is a homage to Lisa Lisa.
 * The video game character Rose from the Street Fighter series is based on Lisa Lisa. Rose's outfit is almost identical to Lisa Lisa's, and she also channels her "Soul Power" into her scarf to fight. One of Rose's alternate costumes in Street Fighter 4 is Lisa Lisa's outfit.
 * Notably, Lisa Lisa also bears some resemblance to her master Straizo.
 * Her forms of training are the breathing masks, the Hell Climb pillar and a final confrontation with her two best fighters (in this case, Loggins and Messina).