Deka Kyoshi 1

Tamio Baba – CMX – 2009 – 3 volumes

It was the character designs that compelled me to read this. They have an old-school, mildly unattractive look to them, and something about the covers made me keep looking at this series. This was another I pounced on after CMX closed shop, but it’s yet another I found to be strangely appealing and charming in unexpected ways.

The main character, nicknamed Mr. Big by the students, is a police officer posing as a teacher for a year in order to solve the mystery of a teacher’s suicide, and to prevent any violence from spreading to members of the teacher’s former class. He’s a big, uncouth fellow that embarrasses himself immediately in front of the fifth graders, and has no problem standing up to the petty injustices at the school and for students who are getting a raw deal at the hands of others. His “sidekick” is a boy named Makoto who can “see” evil auras around people when something bad is about to happen, and is ostracized as a liar by the rest of the class. With Makoto’s power, Mr. Big helps stop all the bad stuff from happening.

It’s a simple formula, but it works. All the characters are likable, and it stays just on this side of the freshness line. It’s never stated that the students are necessarily going to commit suicide, but their bad auras cause them to act out in any number of ways – with violence, by skipping school and becoming someone else, by paralyzing them in dangerous situations, et cetera. The implication is that someone is somehow causing all these bad things to happen, usually by fanning the fires of bullying by playing pranks on the students. This person is not addressed in this volume, but we see him a few times.

As unappealing as the characters look on the cover, inside the art works, and there are decent character designs that are unique enough from one another to make the story easy to read. I also liked the way the “auras” were depicted. The mystery of what’s happening to the class is an interesting one, the incidents in each of the chapters are unique enough that it doesn’t get repetitive (and it has thus far stayed clear of things like the school play or culture day, though bullying is usually the topic du jour), and it’s got a wonderful sense of humor. Its strengths are simple ones, and it makes for a relatively quick and uncomplicated read, but I did fall in love with it by the end of the volume. It’s rated T+, which seems like a pretty high rating for me, but other than a handful of dark topics (the teacher’s suicide, obviously, and a chapter with a cutter), it seems pretty kid-friendly to me, and best suited to a preteen-early teen audience. Then again, I’m not the best judge of content, so take that with a grain of salt.

Two of the three volumes were published, and I’m curious how far this little story gets in the second volume.