Who am I? I'm their homeroom teacher.

Gokusen by Morimoto Kozueko is one of my all time favorites, but it took a bit of unpacking for me to figure out why. The ah-ha moment happened when I was watching the drama adaptation. Something was missing. Something even the ultimate cuteness of Matsumoto Jun couldn't make up for. That something was Attitude with a capital A.

The story revolves around a high school teacher and her class of delinquent students. The students are one step away from a correctional facility, and Yankumi, their homeroom teacher, aims to keep them that way. Usually, this would be a Herculean task, but Yankumi has a secret advantage. She is a third generation Yakuza heir, so delinquents are milk toast compared to what she deals with at home. The stories are episodic, switching between Yankumi's struggles at school (Will her class pass basic arithmetic?) struggles at home (How will she stop a rival gang from encroaching on her turf?), and of course, the ever present difficulty of keeping her identity secret.

Blah blah blah: Crazy Coffee Cat Manhwa Review

One of the mildly relevant title intro panels.

So far I'm not so crazy for Crazy Coffee Cat, a Korean webtoon written by Um Jae Kyung and drawn by Choi Kyung Ah. As far as I can tell from the few scanlations now available, it's a comic of the soonjung romance, slice-of-life variety. Basically it follows protagonist Kho Yang Yra, a girl who has been given a job at a coffee company. Strangely enough, however, I'm eight strips in (which are essentially eight chapters) and I still don't know too much beyond that.

I think part of it is that I don't really understand where this thing is going yet. The exposition is weird in that it feels as though all of the events just sort of happen, without too much buildup, like there isn't any forward movement or logical progression of events. I can't help but wonder if the writing was really planned beforehand, or if it was written as ideas simply occurred to the writer. Even in slice-of-life pieces there's some sense of forward progression, however small. Regardless, I'm getting the feeling that after eight strips we're still not into the meat of the story, so I'm probably making assumptions too early.