The Spring 2017 Manga Guide

GTO: Paradise Lost Vol. 1

What's It About? 

Continuing the misadventures of the delinquent-turned-teacher Eikichi Onizuka, GTO: Paradise Lost is a sequel to Great Teacher Onizuka. Penned once more by Tooru Fujisawa, Paradise Lost features Onizuka taking on a new assignment after his success in dealing with problem classes in the past.  Despite two years on the job, Onizuka remains as reckless, perverted, and immature as ever, and still dreams of marrying a cute high school girl. His prayers seem to be answered when he becomes the assistant teacher of Class G, a special class for young celebrities. While he initially looks forward to overseeing the class's idols and actresses - not to mention working with his fellow teacher, former pin-up girl Nana Kodama - Onizuka quickly learns that Class G is uncontrollable while it suffers under the students’ clique system. Onizuka must use his unorthodox teaching style to bring the class out from under the thumb of its A-list students, particularly the egotistical boy band member Tetsuya Niizaki. Most distressingly, the series is told in the form of a flashback, as Onizuka has been incarcerated for kidnapping one of his students.

GTO: Paradise Lost volume 1 (4/4/2017) is available for $10.99 from Kodansha USA. The latest chapters of the series are available on Crunchyroll.

Is It Worth Reading?

Nik Freeman

Rating: 3.5

Since his debut as a teacher twenty years ago, Onizuka has been one of the go-to examples of fictional nontraditional mentors. He's so blunt, so dumb, so unqualified, and yet goes to such unprecedented lengths for everyone under his supervision that he's an undeniably charming character. In Paradise Lost, he's exactly the same, and is also up to pretty much exactly the same, in all the good and bad ways. The humor is still there, with Onizuka being just as unashamed as ever in how perverted he is and how he's willing to deal with his students. Fujisawa's artwork is fantastic, clearly refined over his years of experience and yet still just as effective at portraying the kind of insanely stupid and ugly content that the series requires. It is absolutely, unmistakably still Great Teacher Onizuka.

For anyone who loves Great Teacher Onizuka, that's all you need to know: Paradise Lost is more of the same, simply with a new gimmick. It has the same premise and it leads to the same over-the-top shenanigans. In that same respect, however, it's a little disappointing. I was expecting the ‘all celebrities’ rule would give Class G a very distinct feel, and present some really bizarre challenges for Onizuka to overcome that wouldn't come up in a normal class. Instead they seem like an ordinary collection of high school students who just happen to be involved in entertainment industries, and even the troublemakers are pretty run-of-the-mill school bullies. Aside from the appearance of groupies throughout the volume, I don't think it would be very different if instead of a clique of up-and-coming actors and singers running the class, the clique consisted of rich students. The struggles of the students and conflicts with the teachers and with each other thus seem generic instead of being tied to the nature of the class. As hilarious as it is to see tiny fangirls acting like violent thugs, that's not enough to make Class G truly seem special. That still has plenty of time to change, but it seems like something that should be established clearly from the outset.

GTO: Paradise Lost demonstrates that Fujisawa has not lost his touch and in fact may be better than ever at portraying Onizuka's antics. The series may not feel very distinct from Great Teacher Onizuka, but that also means it's a good introduction to the franchise. If a grown man donning a luchador mask and hurling frogs at arrogant teenage girls sounds amazing to you, then you should read this. It's immature, it's gross, it's stupid, and it's funny and bizarrely cool.

Amy McNulty

Rating: 3

Eikichi Onizuka's quest to parlay his delinquent days skills into whipping unruly classes into shape never ends, apparently. GTO: Paradise Lost volume 1 works just fine as an entry point to the series. Even before ever reading the end to the first series, readers knew it was going to end with Onizuka making a difference in those unruly kids’ lives in his own extreme, often-inappropriate ways. However, the inevitable ending isn't the point of this series or the one that came before it. While there's little doubt of Onizuka's continued success, the stakes are greater this time around, as he's up against celebrity students who are older, more jaded, and more experienced at manipulating authority figures than Onizuka's initial class. Of course, Onizuka's school staff rival, Hiroshi Uchiyamada, makes the transfer to high school with him, so there's always someone screaming about how he ought to get fired. It's a gag that gets tiresome fast, especially since Kissho Academy Director Ryōko Sakurai believes in Onizuka's unconventional methods for her academy's most troublesome students, so there's little danger Onizuka will ever get the sack. Still, it would be odd if no authority figure tried to put a stop to Onizuka's wackiness. Onizuka himself is as one-note as ever (his thoughts dwell incessantly on women, particularly the idea of marrying a student—any cute girl student), but he never lets anyone get him down, which is part of his appeal.

Few of the other characters stick out in particular, although it's clear there's a boy band student, Tetsuya Nizaki, who's going to cause the most problems for Onizuka for the foreseeable future—and Onizuka's “revenge” this volume only makes his wrath worse. The fact that he was originally simply annoyed at Onizuka for being too chummy speaks to the extent of the mysterious problems with the class as a whole that apparently drove the director's granddaughter to attempt suicide and the previous teacher to stab a student. It's all overdramatic, but beginning the series with a flash-forward to Onizuka serving time for kidnapping one of the kids in this class significantly ups the stakes of what the readers are about to see—even if Onizuka doesn't seem at all hardened by the experience.

Fujisawa's art is distinct, if a touch on the rough side. The characters in particular have overly round faces. Still, the harshness of the style suits the delinquent atmosphere. While the need to continue this long-running series with yet another take on the same formula is questionable, GTO: Paradise Lost proves that some readers can't get enough of this perverted, wacky teacher with a genuine desire to see his students succeed and grow.

Rebecca Silverman

Rating: 3

I have a troubled relationship with the GTO series. As a former victim of middle and high school bullying, I love that he never lets the bad guys get away. In GTO: Paradise Lost’s first volume, in fact, he makes it clear that all of his students are equal in his classroom, and that picking on the supposed “losers” will absolutely not be tolerated. That's indisputably awesome. On the other hand, as a teacher myself, I have a very hard time with his actual methods. Harassing students, threatening them…that's not okay, even in the name of stopping the bullies. Add to that Onizuka's stated goal of marrying a high school girl, and I find myself thoroughly creeped out. 

Since that's where I stand, I have very mixed feelings about this book. I did decide to err on the higher side with my rating, because Toru Fujieda's work is consistently easy to read, both in terms of how he sets up his pages and the flow of the actual plot. His art is also clear, if not always attractive (if frog eggs gross you out, consider yourself warned), and once you get into it, the whole book can be devoured in a very short amount of time. His mechanics at times outweigh his plots, and this is one of those instances.

The basic story here, that Onizuka has been assigned to a troubled high school class for young celebrities after the previous teacher landed in jail for assault and a student put herself in a coma trying to commit suicide, is actually very serious. The book even opens with Onizuka in jail, so we know how this is going to turn out at some point. Once we meet the students, it becomes apparent that the teacher may not have actually done anything, or if she truly did, she was very likely provoked: the leaders of the class are some of the most obnoxious, snotty, entitled twits to ever grace a classroom. One of their first acts is to strip Onizuka as he walks into the room, snap a picture, and then post it to the school message boards – an action that could not only get him fired, but also hit with an indecency lawsuit, or the Japanese equivalent. They're of course fully aware of this: they want him to know that they're special and they're in charge.

Honestly, if I turn off my teacher brain, I will be very happy to see Onizuka take them down. But he himself is such a difficult character to get behind that I'm not sure it would be worthwhile to get there. If you're not a teacher by trade, there's a good chance Onizuka's unorthodox methods won't bother you quite as much, and in that case, this is sort of like a grown-up version of Miss Nelson is Missing. That may be the best way to look at it around the track.