The Fall 2017 Manga Guide

A Terrified Teacher at Ghoul School

What's It About? 

Haruaki Abe desperately wants to be a teacher, but he seems to have a target on his back. Utterly inept at controlling a classroom and the perpetual target of thugs and bullies, the young man is elated when he receives an offer to teach at the mysterious island school known as Hyakki Academy. But when Haruaki reaches the island after a ten-hour ferry ride, he discovers that it's actually a school for yokai – and he's been hired because he inherited the powers of his ancestor, Abe no Seimei! Can Haruaki learn to use his latent abilities to keep his class under control? Or will his yokai students end up controlling him? A Terrified Teacher at Ghoul School! is an original manga by Mai Tanaka, and will be published by Yen Press in December.

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Abe no Seimei might not have quite the same reusability in anime and manga that Oda Nobunaga does, but as far as recognizable historical figures go, he's up there. That's part of what makes A Terrified Teacher at Ghoul School!’s first volume feel a bit too familiar – its protagonist is of course his descendant. That Haruaki Abe is also inept and a total wimp doesn't help particularly; mostly it just makes him kind of irritating, and the twist of his origins as an explanation for why he was hired is tired at best.

That said, I really want to like this series. Although its premise is hardly new, it does throw some interesting twists in there, and some of the humor really does hit. When Haruaki arrives at Hyakki Academy ten hours out from the mainland (for comparison, my one hour ferry ride is for an island twelve miles out) and discovers that he's somehow been hired to teach yokai, the poor man's brain goes into overdrive. He's an anxious, panicky person by nature, so the additional stress of being scared all the time doesn't do much to help him with his teaching. But after his students realize that it really isn't just an act – and an accidental demonstration of his powers shows that he isn't as ordinary as he seems – they do begin to step up. Most interesting is Sano, a yakubyougami, a bad-luck spirit. Sano's the most human in appearance of the yokai, and the fact that he only seems to bring bad luck occasionally and that his particular brand of yokai has been left out of the yokai encyclopedia another teacher gives Haruaki, may imply that he's not as monstrous as he seems. He's also the most immediately sympathetic to Haruaki; right now my best guess would be that he's only half-yokai or something similar. He and Haruaki form an odd friendship fairly quickly, and this feels as if it could come to form a solid core for the series.

The rest of the book is largely a combination of yokai vs human gags that are all vaguely familiar. The best of them generally have to do with mamedanuki Mamekichi, a tiny form of tanuki who historically transforms by throwing his enormous testicles over his head. (“Not since the 20^th century!” he assures us.) There's a frenetic energy to the book that Mamekichi embodies really well, and while it can get wearing at times – Tanaka's not great at knowing when to give readers a breather – it's clear that all this series wants is to be fun. It doesn't work as well as it should (Haruaki's sailor uniform obsession could have been left out, for example), but it really is trying. I wavered a lot between a 2.5 and a 3 for this, and if nothing else, I think it's going to be worth a second volume to see where it goes.

Austin Price

Rating: 3.0

I've been enamored with Japanese youkai since I first played The Legend of the Mystical Ninja on the SNES two decades back. Though what first attracted was the strangeness of their designs – something about cyclopean umbrellas hopping along on rubbery legs and shape-shifting cats and raccoons struck toddler Austin as infinitely more interesting than the sheet-draped ghosts of Americana – as I've gotten older what's cemented their appeal has been the sheer oddity of their behavior. Unlike the capricious fairies of European myth or the sinister demons of Abrahamic lore, youkai are tricksters and troublemakers nevertheless honor bound by the rules to games they themselves devised. It's not unlikely that the greatest genius of Shigeru Mizuki's Kitaro stories is how perfectly they presented the playful essence of these creatures.

Though A Terrified Teacher at Ghoul School! isn't likely to hold a place in the culture so long as Kitaro, it's an amusing enough diversion. In large part that's because it melds that same playful spirit that makes youkai so fascinating with the classic story of a special teacher brought in to do right by a class of delinquents, only in this case it takes care to flip many of these expectations on their heads. Teacher Haruaki might have the inherent mystical talents necessary to keep his class full of ghouls in order, but it's a biproduct of his ancestry, and not one he can call on at will. Beyond that, he's utterly useless as a teacher and a role model, nothing but a cowardly and histrionic loser regularly bullied by the same student he's expected to teach.

It's a welcome twist on a genre that's grown a bit stale over the decades, especially as it allows the cadre of apparitions under Harukai's care to flex their own idiosyncrasies a bit and play havoc within the schools unique little milieu. These goons’ various gimmicks and powers often play one off of the other in fun ways that lend their hijinks a bit of visual character while saddling each new botch with its own little unique set of rules to fix.

However, for all that it's a sadly unambitious work. Haruaki's personality is amusing at first but overplayed to such pitiful extremes that he becomes more and more grating as the volume goes on. Jokes about his obsession with sailor uniforms are barely funny at first, and hardly at the thirtieth repetition; his tendency to break into floods of sobs at even the most minor challenge begins as a joke but feels more with each iteration like an honest debilitation. It feels as if creator Mai Tanaka is phoning too many of these gags in.

Tanaka's similarly cut corners when it comes to the character designs, which should leave them the perfect excuse to draw a host of creative spins on some of the most visually interesting apparitions in world history but which they often shirk in favoring of drawing nothing but a group of off-color highschool delinquents. It may be that they're afraid of cluttering the already busy page compositions, which is a fair concern: the art is appealing with plenty of strong background work to ground the series in a distinct place, but it's also cluttered and too often unclear about what is happening where, when, and to whom. It's expected that a series with this premise would often be as frantic as it is, but it could do to allow a bit more space and time.

Amy McNulty

Rating: 4

The title A Terrified Teacher at Ghoul School! is an apt description of the hilarious happenings in the first volume of this series. More comedy- and character-focused than plot-driven, A Terrified Teacher at Ghoul School! succeeds on the strength of the people and creatures populating its pages. Protagonist Abe is especially endearing with his easily-frightened personality in the face of teen yokai, though the running gag about his penchant for sailor school uniforms—on or off a young woman—is cringe-worthy and gets old pretty quickly. However, his relationship with yakubyou (a spirit who brings misfortune) student Sano in particular is a highlight of the volume. The taciturn, almost-sadistic student helps coax Abe out of his shell time and again and a small part of Sano seems to have a grudging respect for the first human teacher at his school.

Several other students and two other instructors get adequate development this early on to flesh out Abe's school life to the point where the reader feels sufficiently invested in this wacky world by volume's end to want to keep reading more stories focused on these characters. However, it's a shame that some of the most visually interesting students are mere background characters thus far. There's a towering giant skeleton yokai (a gashadokuro) and a yokai with an abnormally long neck (a rokurokubi), as well as a student with a lantern for a face (a chouchin), but they're barely given anything to do around the more human-looking yokai.

Tanaka's art is an aesthetically pleasing mix of bishonen and bishojo alongside less human yokai and sometimes frightening visages. Abe's frazzled personality is especially well conveyed in his slightly disheveled appearance; he always seems like he hasn't gotten enough sleep. Though almost the entire volume is set in a single classroom—with some stops at a dorm, the teacher's lounge, and the nurse's office along the way—the background art is detailed and the old-fashioned exteriors of the buildings ingeniously paint the picture of a spirit world just two steps shy of a modern Japanese high school.

A Terrified Teacher at Ghoul School! volume 1 presents gag after gag and almost never lets up. It's a fast read with interesting characters and appealing, often-humorous visuals. Both comedy fans and readers who eagerly consume classroom stories will find their itches scratched if they pick up this first volume.