GTO: Great Teacher Onizuka

Eikichi Onizuka is a 22-year-old high school dropout in need of some direction. He has a black belt in karate, a Kawasaki bike, a porn collection and a habit of squatting at the bottom of escalators so he can look up skirts. Not an obvious choice for the moniker "Great Teacher." But the seemingly unlikely premise of this manga is that these qualities are precisely what will make Onizuka a success. He might be misguided—he wants to become a teacher so he can meet young, impressionable high-school hotties—but his struggles to find a path to adulthood through the wilds of hormones and violent impulses are not unsympathetic. In fact, the book is wildly popular and has been made into a Japanese live-action TV drama, a film and an anime series. If this first volume doesn't quite explain the work's popularity, it does aptly outline the issues that will operate throughout the rest of the series (sexual frustration, and the tension between Onizuka's tough-guy biker past and his hidden good-guy persona). Tokyopop's English-language version remains faithful to the Japanese original, reading from back to front and from left to right. The drawings are serviceable, with comically dead-on depictions of sweaty-faced guys in various stages of anguish, surprise or shock. Unfortunately, the females are given less subtle shadings of expression—they range from cute and perky to forlorn and perky—and the printing is sometimes difficult to read. However, like Onizuka himself, the writing is breezy and unaffected, and therein lies a good deal of the book's charms. (July)