I don’t think I ever found an anime that, after watching it, made me want to read the manga as badly as the Anime of Gokusen did. That is why I am writing this review slightly along side my review of the anime. I do have to say this though, I feel the manga was actually a little bit better then the anime, and I think it’s because we got to connect more with the characters, especially the students.

A lot of what I have to write about the characters has been said in my Anime review but for those that don’t want to read that, I guess I will summarize it here a bit. We first should talk about our main character Kumiko. The whole manga is based around how the two sides of her life clash together. When I talk about two sides, I am talking about the well mannered school teacher side of her life, and the fact that she is heir to a Yakuza group. I did not talk about this much in my anime review as it was not really that big a thing, but Yankumi (as the student’s called her) lost her parents at a very young age and was sent to live with her Grandfather who is also the head of a Yakuza group with very strong ties to a lot of other branches. Because of this, she has a very strong moral code to both Family and the Yakuza life style, something that she tries and ‘fails’ to hide in her passion of being a school teacher. She ended up being hired to work at Shirokin which is an all boys High School where basically the ‘Delinquents’ are put. Surprisingly, her Yakuza life style is like the perfect match for the school.

The second main character I would like to bring up is Shin Sawada. Without going into much spoiler for one of the arcs, the most I could say about his family life is complicated. Because of this, he lives mostly on his own and is a very well put together kid; a lot more mature then his other classmates. Just as with the anime, he finds out Kumiko’s secret very early on and ends up with this odd obsession with it, butting into a lot of her business. It was very odd reading the manga because at first, Yankumi was very against him getting involved with anything dangerous but then slowly he became someone she could sort lean on and talk things out with. She seemed to end up sort of relying that he would always be there for her, and that sort of feeling seemed to rub off on him at some point.

I can’t talk a lot about the students as most of it is spoilers for the situations they get into, but I can say that there is one main group that stood out among the rest. That would be Shin’s strange band of friends, Minami, Uchi, Kuma, and Noda. Kuma stands out a bit more as being sort of Shin’s side kick but the others end up getting their own arcs and their own sort of identity making them very relatable. I wish the same could be said for the Yakuza members but sadly, I can’t remember any of them off the top of my head except her Grandfather, her two ‘brothers’, and the second in command. The others are a bit harder for me to pin point in that I remember the stories, but the first moment I see them, I forget who they are. (And then there are some I just choose to forget because I just didn’t like the character to begin with.)

And now I do have to bring up her dog, Fuji. Where I fell in love with him in the anime, I sadly did not get much with him in the manga. It was half way through the books when Fuji actually started acting like how he acted in the anime but it was only when he and Shin were alone and in the bonus chapters. Every other time, he was just a normal dog doing normal things. It made me a little sad that he just ended up being this strange side character that felt like he was put in for those who liked him in the anime.

The manga is a lot more… mature then the anime. There are many more adult themes put into the story line with talks of Rape, prostitution and under age drinking. The nice thing is that it is not put in there for shock value. It just showed that school life isn’t really as beautiful as people try to make it out to be. Although this is not in any way a ‘slice of life’ type of manga like Azumanga Daioh (Yes, I know Azumanga is a girls show and this is a men’s show), it does show a slice of life that we do not glorify. That’s one reason why I consider this much like GTO, where they will show problems in broken homes and then a teacher will come in to try and fix it. It actually made me laugh a little that of all the families that are shown in the manga, Yankumi’s seemed more perfect out of them all and it was a family built around being Yakuza.

The animation style is pretty simple for the most part, although the titles to the chapters and the odd page out would be very well shaded. I do love the artwork even if the designs are strange. Again, we have the really odd delinquent style designs for all the characters, pretty much dating the manga. When I say dating, I don’t mean of when the show came out. I do feel that I have to explain a little bit more as I never quite got into it with my anime review. In a lot of older anime and manga, there is a stereotype style that has been around for the delinquents and bullies. Most of the time, its large hair, thick gangster accent, and the school outfit worn slightly out of code or something. It has been that way even in the 90s and though that design has been reworked and made to fit a more nutrual style in most newer manga, this feels as though it is giving tribute to the old designs. When you look at it that way, the manga does very well in keeping that feeling alive even if it was written rather new in comparison.

Unlike the anime, I was able to sit for longer reading the manga without the cheesy dialog being voiced. I don’t really understand why as the dialog was still cheesy and designed like an old school manga and yet I kept on turning the page. I think it might be the fact it wasn’t being voiced that made it less embarrassing to read. Whatever the case, although I liked both the anime and manga, the manga feels like it explains a lot better and makes you feel more connected to the characters. There are a bunch of live action movies and TV shows but I do doubt that I will be getting to those any time soon.