Delcatty

Hirohiko Araki launched the sixth part of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, titled Stone Ocean, in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump in issue 1 of 2000, dated January 1. The arc ran through April 2003 across 158 chapters and seventeen collected tankobon volumes. Stray Cat first appears in the chapter "Strange Pet" published in mid-2002 as a houseplant that grew where a deceased black cat had been buried; the cat's Stand ability transferred into the plant's leaves and bulbs, creating a botanical-feline hybrid that fires bullets of compressed air through punctured air pockets. The plant-cat is initially encountered by the protagonist Jolyne Cujoh and her ally Emporio Alnino inside the Green Dolphin Street prison facility in Florida, the setting of Stone Ocean's main arc. Stray Cat recognizes only its original caretaker, the deceased Kiyomi Kujo, but bonds with characters who water and care for it. The cat-plant is later weaponized by the antagonist Enrico Pucci in the second half of the arc, with Pucci grafting the Stand ability onto his own body using the character's seed. Araki has stated in interviews that Stray Cat draws on the long-running JoJo motif of Stands manifesting through unusual hosts, and that the botanical hybrid was specifically chosen to expand what counts as a Stand user beyond the human-and-animal categories of earlier arcs. The character contributes the air-bullet ability that figures into the climactic confrontation between Jolyne and Pucci in volume seventeen. David Production produced the anime adaptation of Stone Ocean for Netflix global streaming in three release batches between December 2021 and December 2022, totaling thirty-eight episodes. Stray Cat features in episodes thirty-one through thirty-seven of the adaptation, faithfully reproducing the original air-bullet mechanics and the character's relationship with Pucci. The anime introduced Stray Cat to a wider international audience whose JoJo entry point had typically been the earlier Phantom Blood through Vento Aureo seasons.