GTO (Great Teacher Onizuka) is absolutely legendary. It’s about a former gang member turned teacher teaching one of the worst classes in his school & turning them around into fine young men & women. Throughout time its been hailed as an all time great & for very good reason. In this review I hope to explain what makes this series so legendary.
I’ll start with the concept. A manga about turning into delinquents into fine people, giving them a figure in their life to look up to. It’s not the most original set-up in story telling but because of this we get to see ourselves in a variety of different situations ranging from down to earth & realistic, to completely out-there bat-shit insanity. Below its surface, GTO is a manga with a heart of gold about teaching life lessons & finding ones place in life. I don’t want to oversell it because GTO at its core is a comedy manga. But with GTO, I come for what’s seemingly a good comedy manga at first glance, & then I stay with it for the life lessons & characters that, while I don’t necessarily relate to. I’m sure many do & I can imagine there’s someone out there who were like at least one of the characters in this manga at some point in their life that not only relate to these but Onizuka transcended just being a character in a comedy manga & turned into somebody they looked up to.
I surely look up to Onizuka as cheesy as that may sound. I really do though, while Onizuka as a character obviously wouldn’t work in a real life scenario given how many school rules & at times laws he outright breaks. At one point to “teach his students a lesson” he ties them up, dunks them in water, & basically scars them for life. Another point early in the series as a means of getting back for one of his students, he stalks the victims bullies to a karaoke bar, ties them up, takes pictures of the girls in erotic positions & threatens to post the pictures on the internet (which he doesn’t actually do). So Onizuka isn’t exactly the most orthodox, or even morally right teacher out there, but at the end of the day he’s still a man I can never the less look up to for his ability to really teach those lessons he wants to get across.
On the opposite end, you can also understand where the students are coming from, why they’re assholes, & why they hate authority above all else. Take Nana for example, she’s a lonely girl who once lived a very happy family life in a small 5 tatami matt room. Once her father actually gained a new job & an increased level of wealth, the family became more distant with each other & see become less & less happy overtime & wished things could go back the way they were as she hardly feels like her family is a family anymore. When Onizuka learns of this story he decides to go to her house & put a giant hole in the wall with a sledge hammer. Metaphorically but also literally tearing down the walls that separate this family so that they may become reunited & learn to bond again. It’s moments & stories like that placed throughout that really make this manga into the legendary work of fiction that it’s become.
But Onizuka isn’t a manga that’s always tackling some of these heavy themes, it also knows when to lay back & just be a good comedy, & I give it serious credit. Onizuka is a pretty funny series that had me laughing at 90% of its jokes & situations. I remember one moments when Onizuka was trying to get this Yakuza boss’s kid back into school after a nearly 3 month absence. He puts on this heavy tough guy front calling out the Yakuza’s kid whilst being respectful about his situation. It actually works thanks to Onizuka treating the kid with respect, his speech convinces the kid to come back to school. Because of all the guns pointed directly at him during the speech, we then cut to reveal that Onizuka feared for his life so much that he actually ended up pissing his pants in fear. While some may look at that as juvenile I look at it as funny & grounding Onizuka back to reality because although he may be a Great Teacher, he’s still just a regular person at the end of the day, he may’ve been a former gang member but he’s still a man who values life (well, his own life in this instance) so of course he’s piss his pants out of fear of death.
I do need to bring up the art which is honestly the weakest part of the series. I don’t think GTO is necessarily badly drawn (I consider badly drawn to be art so bad that I genuinely can’t tell what’s supposed to be going on) & in that case GTO gets a pass because I can tell what things are supposed to be, action scenes don’t have too much going on to where things become a mess, & the faces are actually really well drawn a lot of the time (I should stress the comedic ones). But a problem with GTO’s art is that characters can kind of blend together from time to time, specifically the women, sometimes I can’t tell who’s who’s unless they call out the names which is very much a bad thing. I don’t think this necessarily detracts from the major character moments that I come to this manga for but nevertheless it can be pretty distracting.
GTO’s pacing is reasonably well, it’s largely a 50-50 split on text to art ratio & it took me about 40-50 minutes to read a volume give or take. I don’t think jokes overstay their welcome, beat to beat the story flows well & arcs last for just long enough as to feel satisfying but not truncated. It isn’t like Astro Boy where some stories have this problem in that they reach their climax & then the falling action happens to quickly, leading to some of the stories feeling truncated which GTO thankfully doesn’t suffer from.
It’s a combination of GTO’s absurdness, funny moments, down to earth character moments, but above all else heart of gold that turn this series into a legendary work of fiction. While it is a pretty simple manga in concept it thrives in the simplicity & uses it to create some layered-ness to its characters & story. I highly implore anyone to check this legendary series out if only for Onizuka himself he really lives up to that moniker of Great Teacher Onizuka.
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