To be sure, our protagonist is not the only male indulging in panty-centric teen lechery. Fujisama is aware that most early twenty-something males aren't much more highly evolved than your average adolescent boy, and he gets much comic mileage from this fact once he plunks the ex-biker into an actual school setting. While a teacher in training, Onizuka gets quickly set up by a comely schoolgirl in league with a gang of student blackmailers. He bullies and batters his way into retrieving the compromising photos they've taken of him, then tries to help the girl get along with her distant, embattled parents. What began as comedy suddenly takes a u-turn into domestic drama.

Look past the jokes, the leering sexuality and moments when GTO goes ballistic, and there's frequently a serious undertone to this series. When Onizuka finally lands a job at Holy Forrest Private Academy, the first student he connects with is a bullied teen attempting suicide. Onizuka's homeroom turns out to be the school's most difficult class, a collection of vicious schemers who'll readily turn on any classmate outside their clique. No harmless group of amiable Sweathogs, these: in one chapter, coeds strip and beat another student.

As a teacher/mentor, Onizuka follows his gut more than his brain: when confronted with a bullied student - or is himself targeted by his homeroom - his default response is to plot revenge. (Though we're told he's an alumnus of Eurasia Collage, he could easily have graduated from Faber College.) Much of the third and fourth volumes of the series focus on the conflict between GTO and his resistant class: in one sequence, for instance, our hero gets both his hands super-glued into a pair of bowling balls by an antagonistic student.

He also gains a nemesis within the school administration: vice-principal Uchiyamada, your standard officious middle-aged moral hypocrite (first time we see him, he's trying to cop a feel on the bus). The v-p vows to purge our hero from the faculty roster (he correctly sees that the big lug's an academic ignoramus but can't acknowledge his intuitive skill at slowly winning over the "unteachable" class), a conflict no doubt prolonged through subsequent volumes.

As a reader, I still get periodically thrown by Fujisawa's willingness to twist his character's features to suit Onizuka's mercurial moods. But the artist captures school and city settings quite effectively. The action in GTO runs the gamut from teacher lounge chatfests to frenetic action sequences (in volume two, we get a high-speed truck chase as Onizuka tries to make to a job interview on time) is efficiently handled. At times, however, I can't shake the feeling that I'm missing something in the panels. Of all the manga graphic novels I've read to date, GTO is most packed with references to Japanese pop and youth culture new to these Western eyes.