Julian Gnam
March 25, 2009 
In the manga world, it’s easy to become jaded by the legions of cookie cutter bishounen pretty boys and angsty school girls, and resort to dismissing everything with a school uniform on the cover. I peeled the shrink wrap off Gakuen Prince with a groan, the disproportioned, metrosexual teen on center stage with his shirt hanging open and designer underwear just slightly exposed, prepared me for the worst. Either it would be a stock tale of a school girl meeting her dream guy, or it would be all-out yaoi. The full extent of how mistaken I was proceeded to knock me on my proverbial ass over the ensuing pages.
Gakuen Prince plays with the familiar manga clichés just enough to sneak up on you. The protagonist is an effeminate teenage boy attending his first day at a formerly all-girls school with only 4-5 males in the population. He is so uninterested in girls that he comes across as sexist. Stereotypical high school social castes are so emphasized that the author had to use the Japanese version of the Roman alphabet, which as we all know starts with the letter S, just to describe it. A hopeless nerd does self-narrate “Everyone will notice me! I don’t want to stand out” on the third page of the story. However, after that point, all bets are off.
The reader is made aware that something isn’t right with this seemingly paint-by-numbers story when the main character, Azusa Mizutani, storms out of the student president’s office muttering insults and happens upon a female student who has just been bullied and stripped by her classmates. A teacher passing by proceeds to remove her own underwear, in plain sight, in the middle of the hallway, and lend it to the girl. Mizutani is then introduced to one of the few other male students in the school, who is so androgynous; that Mizutani doesn’t know he’s speaking to a male until he gropes the boy’s chest.
It’s this sort of raunchy humor, which sneaks up and spits in the face of manga conventions, which really catches the reader by surprise and makes Gakuen Prince a thrilling roller coaster ride of a read. After being licked on the neck by yet another effeminate male student in a homoerotic gag of a warning, Mizutani (and the reader) are informed of the series’ true premise; the meager number of male students in the school has made the female population so sexually frustrated that the few male students present are under constant threat of sexual abuse.
When Mizutani is chased out of the classroom by half the school and forced to hide in a maintenance closet, he finds himself sharing the space with Rise Okitsu, the passive aggressive, geeky girl who doesn’t want to be noticed, who had already ducked into the closet to avoid the uproar herself. In an effort to drive off the rest of the female populace, Mizutani instantly tears off his shirt, open’s Okitsu’s blouse, and kicks open the closet door — announcing to the entire school that they are dating and that he will fraternize with no one else.
And so the series’ shtick is unveiled in one of the more unlikely couples to recently emerge from manga. Okitsu is so anti-social that she’s completely averted to the idea of dating anyone, and Mizutani’s announcement only brings her the very hazing and negative attention from her female classmates she fears most. She responds with violence and draws blood whenever Mizutani makes an advance, but once they’re known as an item, the repercussions from the school population are so severe that they are forced to stick together for protection.
Whether such a stunt of storytelling can remain original and interesting over ensuing volumes remains to be seen, but Gakuen Prince certainly has my attention. It enjoyably shatters expectations with its role reversals and sly, almost underhanded parody of the genre’s conventions. Despite the seemingly delicate handling of the characters, Jun Yuzuki is not afraid to draw grotesquely ugly faces and turn things upside down. Volume 1 is a laugh a minute and worth a read.
Publisher: Del Rey
Story and Art: Jun Yuzuki
Rating: 16+
