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Reviewed by Craig Johnson “Meet Eikichi Onizuka, a 22-year-old virgin and ex-biker. He’s crude, foul-mouthed, and has a split second temper. His goal: to be the Greatest High School Teacher in the World! Onizuka may think he’s the toughest guy on campus, but when he meets his class full of bullies, blackmailers, and scheming sadists, he’ll have to prove it.“ This is the first volume of a long-running series about Onizuka, and his attempts to become a Great Teacher (hence the title of the series), unfortunately the whole thing nearly grinds to a halt in the first third of this first book with an inauspicious start – Onizuka is totally unsympathetic, and you actually end up despising him for his first few actions (he sits at the bottom of an escalator, looking up young teens’ skirts; he deals with critics of his actions by beating the crap out of them; his biggest influence on other students is by violence, not by boring things like inspiration, dedication, intelligence). The guy is a total arse, and with his stupid haircut he looks it too. Fortunately for Onizuka (and equally fortunately for the reader), a haircut and a change of clothes doth changeth the man, and we suddenly get a guy we can relate to a little bit more: sure he’s still a perv, but now he’s humorous with it (when a female student cries her heart out having been thrown out of her parents’ house, she follows him home and he has to keep her outside whilst he vainly tries to tidy away his stash of porn, sex toys and inflatable dolls in thirty seconds). The plot of this first volume covers Onizuka’s two weeks of teacher training – basically thrown into the deep end as a student teacher with the rowdiest class in a particularly troublesome high school. A classic bait-and-switch (which catches both Onizuka and the reader by surprise) puts him in a very bad position (compounded by his own internal conflict about whether to cop off with the female students or act somewhat more professionally), which he resolves in a similar fashion to earlier in the book – yet, again, this time more humour is present, and Onizuka shows the makings of a sympathetic character. This is developed later on when he comes up with a creative solution to a pupil’s personal problem – involving a large hammer and her parents. That’s the cliffhanger the book ends up, and it’s tremendously effective, you really don’t want to wait to pick up the next book to see just what the heck this guy is playing at. So we’ve a good solid start to the series after a stuttering first fifty or so pages – bear this in mind when you read the book, it’s worth the effort to stick with it through that opening sequence. Comment on this review of GTO v1 on the Manga Life Forums. |
6 October 2009
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