Manga / Sentai School

Sentai School: L'École des Héros; literally The Hero School.

"Bad is good!"

"Sentai School: no teacher's strike, no holidays, no vacations. Because in Sentai School, superheroes are in training; real old-school heroes. So if you wanna come, you'd better have one hell of a resumé and an introduction letter, and beware if you're dead last."

Sentai School was one of the very first manfra [French animesque comics] edited by Semic Manga and then by Kami between 2003 and 2008.It was written by Philippe Cardona and Florence Torta, and drawn by Philippe Cardona. It debuted as a doujinshi before it was published in Coyote, a French anime magazine.

It's about a Japanese Superhero School where the students/ heroes are sentai or shonen. At first a boys school, it becomes coeducational in volume 2, introducing magical girls or Action Girl. The story is an Affectionate Parody of manga, especially sentai and others well known in France. Nearly every character is a spoof of famous manga characters: For instance, Oscar-sensei the costume teacher looks like the real Oscar, The Rose of Versailles heroine. There are two poor and starved children, named Remi and Sarah, that spoof heroes from Sans Famille and A Little Princess animated series among others. Moreover, savvy readers will notice Shout Outs to monsters that look like Doraemon or Mike Wazowski, and bit players like Maetel from Galaxy Express 999 in an airport.

Although the series was thought to have ended in 2008 with 5 volumes, it was revived thanks to a crowdfunding campaign and a 6th volume came out in July 2017. It features much of the same humor, but with updated references, as our heroes and villains struggle against more modern trends or heroism and villainy that made their style outdated.

The main characters are a group of five persons:

• Ken Eraclor: The Hero and coldest one. He hides the fact that he's an unfinished Artificial Human and lives alone with his Robot Dog, Nonos 2 ("Bony 2"), since his builder abandoned him. He's very dense, never smiles, and understands things verbatim.He's fascinated by mysteries and their solving, and explain solutions while wearing typical Case Closed glasses. The problem is, Ken is always wrong. A good reason could be that he mistake fairy tales books with method ones.
• Hongo Wing: The dark and badass guy. He loses his temper very quickly and wears his collars up.
• Duke: ( Only One Name ) Spoof of Duke Fleed from UFO Robo Grendizer and resembles him physically. The cool guy, he plays the guitar and has a cute pet, Chibi Goldo ("Chibi Grendi", a spoof of Grendizer).
• Toa Girara: The fat guy, Big Eater and accomplished cook. He's insignificant to his schoolmates til he becomes rich in volume 4. His name is like "Yu" (pronounce You) in french ("toi"). So each time somebody says "you", he answers "Me?"
• Keiji Jasper: The effeminate and cute guy. Very gentle,loves animals,real and stuffed, cartoons for children , can do Puppy-Dog Eyes and wears a pink jacket. That cute side hides a evil personality called dark Keiji, he is always in a bad mood and dresses in black.

Also includes :

• Shinobi Jasper: Keiji's little sister, better known as Bibi. She's so shy that she doesn't speak loud enough to be heard, except on stage, when she's angry, or after the last volume when her trauma definitely ends. Ironically, she has a Berserk Button, and can show extraordinary strength This is mainly when a girl is too close to Hongo, whom Bibi secretly loves (he never notices until the last volume).
• Tofu Leformidable ("Marvellous"). An extremely vain and wealthy ex-singer,actor and model. Loved by every girl in school but he only loves Bibi and she can't stand him. He returns to his boy band Jambon Ruban. ("Ham Ribbon")in the last volume.
• Koji Alcor: Spoof of Kouji Kabuto from Anime/Mazinger saga, "Alcor" is his name in France. In that country where UFO Robo Grendizer was the only broadcast of the series (and very first anime) Alcor is not the Mazinger series hero, but the Grendizer Lancer. After French fandom discover the truth, this was parodied: Koji Alcor spend his time saying he can do everything better than everyone...except Duke. He also have a pet called Chibi Zinger. Raised on a farm and hates to be reminded of it.
• Ultra Sama: The Headmaster, spoof of Ultraman.
• Stratequerre: Spoof of King Vega UFO Robo Grendizer Big Bad, that is called "Strateguerre" ("strategy" and "guerre", war)in French version. Parodied with "Equerre" (set square). Headmaster of the Villain's School opposite the Sentai School, and Duke's uncle.
• Viper Stratequerre: His daughter, arrived late (volume 4). A brat that pretends to be nice just to put her dad on edge. So she's in Sentai School instead of Villain School, and is Bibi's close friend.
• Guy Le Cobra: Spoof of Cobra and Guy, High School Kimengumi rebel. He has a rebellious way of life and took Ken as his master.
• Mr Spectreman: Spoof of Spectreman. Head Teacher.
• Miss Gege: Spoof of Magical Princess Minky Momo,(Gigi in french) with nerd glasses. The counselor, that can transform like the real Momo.
• Kenshiro of Otaku: The janitor, spoof Kenshiro of Hokuto in Fist of the North Star.
• Matt Ban: Spoof of Batman, speaks in a strange way (all sentences, even yells, begin with "Je de" ("I of").) Came from America, wanted to open a Hero School for comics guys but failed. Since, lives secretly on campus and appears as a frequent cameo.
• The Freezer Gang: Band of 19th-century pupils heroes, in a school that was before under Sentai School. Brought back to life after being frozen. Spoof of Older Than Television heroes such as Zorro, Davy Crockett, The Phantom, Sinbad, Robin Hood and Prince Valiant.

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This book provides examples of:

• Academy of Adventure: According to Hongo, "This school would make anyone go crazy."
• Academy of Evil: The Villain's school, right across the street.
• Affectionate Parody: The whole plot. Also, some fictions in particular in some chapters. For instance, a journey to Toa's uncle place. His name is Charles Ringalls.
• Almost Kiss: Bibi and Hongo, on a stage in gender-bended Snow White ending. What a pity G.I. Joes land up at the wrong moment. Again in the last volume, with a under influence Hongo. He wakes up right before the act and is "kidnapped" by his brother and father, while Bibi is still waiting with eyes closed.
• Anthology Comic: The last book. It was the same story all along but only first and last chapters were drawn by the original artist, Phillipe Cardona. All others were by differents artists (including co-scenarist Florence Torta)
• Arch-Enemy: Stratequerre and Ultra-sama are, since nursery days. Doctor Poulpy (Spoof of Doctor Octopus, of course) is also one for Peter Naraignee.
• Arson, Murder, and Admiration: Stratequerre is, among others examples, especially proud of her daughter when she is sent in detention room.
  • His students, or Anaconda's organization of americans villains often praise Stratequerre's vileness.
• Artistic License – Geography: In book 3, pupils go to California from (apparently) Japan. So they would just have the Pacific to cross. The problem is, they first land in New York and then cross the whole country, just as if they came from Europe.
• Badass Cape: There's a class for it. Actually, there's even Badassness classes.
• Bad Job, Worse Uniform: After realised that Bibi just found a job, Viper imagine what it can be and the uniforms that goes with are worse and worse: a crab mascot for a restaurant, a Meido uniform for a bar, a sexy cosplay or a bunny outfit for a nightclub.

• Beach Episode: Chapter "Sea, Sentai and Sun" in book 3, which is doubles as a Battle Royale parody.
• Berserk Button:
  • Bibi: A girl touching Hongo in a romantic way, or anybody hitting him.
  • Keiji: Anybody touching his sister (romantically or not).
  • Hongo: Any comment about his collar.
  • Koji: Being reminded of his farming past.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Stratequerre (He does have a card he often gives.)

• Catchphrase: Not only a given, but also a exam subject!
  • Ken:
    • "Myxomatose and Wooden pipe!" : His Battle Cry.
    • "Who on earth are you?" : To everybody, all the time, including close friends.
    • "And yet my reasoning was without flaws." : What Ken say after his mystery-explaining reasoning was proven totally wrong. As in, every time.
  • Toa - "Chief's pizza and broccoli!" : His Battle Cry, from Samurai Pizza Cats.
  • Stratequerre - "Bad is good" (literally and in English in text).
  • Viper - "Good is not so bad".
  • Matt Ban - "Je de" ("I of") , who learned foreign languages badly.
  • Guy L'Cobra - "I'm rebel"
  • Koji Alcor
    • "I'm better at X-ing!"/"I can do X better than you!" : When his competitive side is roused. As in, every time.
    • "I'M NOT A FARM BOY!!!!!!!!" : Usually following a (more or less apropriate) Phrase Catcher.
• Character Development : Most of main characters: Toa after he found fortune, Duke when his cousin regularly put him on edge after her arrival, Viper who do nothing but bother people starts helps her best friend in exhange of nothing, Hongo when he realize Bibi feel something for him and the most: Bibi, after she's able to speak out loud and loose shyness.
• Christmas Episode: The last book was mostly one.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Debbie Breakfoot. She say every other girls that tried to take Angus away from her are in graves by now. Bibi towards Hongo as well.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Subverted. Ken is The Hero, but wears blue, while red is for Big Guy Toa. And Pink is for effeminate guy (Keiji), not for a regular chick. The girls, Bibi and Viper, have green and white jackets. Though he's in The Team, Hongo wear silver, the Sixth Ranger color.
• Cooking Duel:Between Toa and Takoyaki.
• Cousin Oliver: And actuals cousins at that!
  • Viper, for Duke.
  • Takoyaki Lemagnifique("The Magnificient"), the friendly millionaire, for Tofu.
  • Glups (spoof Guts from Berserk), Keiji's cousin.
  • Kenshiro has two cousins (Jojo and Shinshiro, the Villain's School Janitor), and an extended family.
  • Harlock-sensei, badassery teacher, and Dr Blackjack, the School Nurse, are cousins as well....
  • Hongo complains he only has a big brother, Onizoku Wing)
• A Day In The Lime Light: on the Breakfast Club principle, six secondary characters (Koji, Guy, Viper, Tofu, Jayx and Lydia) use detention time to spy on a teacher, and hope to be soon as popular as the official five for it.
• Deadpan Snarker: Hongo and Viper
• Distracted by the Sexy: Hongo, when Bibi passes by in her ballroom dress.
• Evil Counterpart: Dark Keiji.
• Evil Twin: Debbie, for Bibi.
  • Also subverted:
    • Billy Boy ("Willy Boy", Koya No Shonen Isamu's French name) the modest farmboy is Koji's Good Twin.
    • Takoyaki, shares his cousin Tofu's good looks and taste for dramatic entrances but is polite, generous with his money, and an all-around Nice Guy.
    • Angus Winch, the FBI american agent whose design is litteraly a blond Hongo with a sunny personality, with a constant smile to contrast with Hongo's Perpetual Frowner.
• Face Palm: Mostly from Hongo, Viper and the teachers, when confronted with the antics of the group and/or the insane logic behind it.
• Forceful Kiss: Viper decide to kiss the very first good guy in front of her father to bother him - and it's Hongo. She escape a death-by-Bibi because she quickly explains to have chosen the first one in sight - she does not even know his name.
• Four-Fingered Hands
• Haunted House: The Vacation chapter "Resident Sentai". They decide to recycle it on an amusement ride with true zombies inside at the end. And Koji met a quite friendly version of the Predator. With cookies.
• Handsplay in Theater: Hongo under Viper's influence takes Bibi to a theater. She mumbles her wish for a horror film, but he picks a romantic one.Viper makes him put his arm around Bibi, but in a subversion, she faints from excessive bliss.
• High School AU: Main characters are originals, but all students from Sentai School or Villain School are kids versions of manga-anime heroes.

• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: All titles contain the word "Sentai".
• Impossibly Delicious Food: Parodied with the Cooking Duel's reaction of judges.Toa and Takoyaki, the duelists, decide afterwards to supply the school cafeteria.After he witness their classmates 's reactions, Hongo ask "What do you put in that food?"
• It Runs in the Family: The Stratequerre family: Villains since 25 generations.
• Lampshade Hanging: Frequent.
  • When a bunch of fangirls suddently appears behind a hot teacher or student:
  There were so many girls in that class? Where are they from?
  • Student Peter Naraignée start to tell his life in the 1960's :
  But, how old are you?"
  • A ring appears for a Ultra Sama and Stratequerre fight:
  How did that get here???
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Parodied obviously when Major Anaconda, the American Trial Arc Big Bad, tells Angus he is his father. He expects a Big "NO!" that don't come. Plays it totally straight (and Crosses the Line Twice) when he tells Debbie Breakfoot he also slept with her mom, so she's her love interest's half sister. He then proceeds to one-up himself by picking random members of the court audience and listing his relation to them.
• Maid Corps: Tofu have a male corps, made of the bodyguards variant. He needs them for everything ( including receiving punches in their faces instead of his) and they're so many that Tofu just can't remember their names.
• Maybe Ever After: Bibi playfully announce to Viper that she just "won't tell" if she finally hooked up with Hongo at the end of book 5. And due to Screwed by the Network, we will never know.
• Mr. Fanservice: An in-Universe exemple. Apart from Bibi (caring only for Hongo), Lydia (caring for Jayx) and Viper (caring for herself), all school girls chase after Tofu, or Duke, or the 'Villain Psychology' teacher, all the freaking time. Turned up to eleven in the final book with Tofu's Boys Band.
• Mundane Ghost Story: Toa tells one around the campfire in "Resident Sentai", with a flashlight aimed up under his face, and it sounds like a sum-up of Junji Ito 's works.
• New Transfer Student: Peter Naraignee.
• Not That Kind of Doctor: Dr. Kiriko is the Villain Academy's nurse. And because he's the only one to have a medicine doctorate among all others teachers. (Doctor Man, Doctor Hell , Doctor Bio, and Doctor Claw.)
• Noticing the Fourth Wall: A broken door fall on Jayx, prompting him to say he never wanted to become a Chew Toy. Also, Ken taking note that everyone, even from different countries, seems to speak the same language.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Kinda: Hongo seems unable, in volumes 2 and 3, to remember Tofu and Bibi's real names. He keeps call them "Truc" and "Machin" ("Doodad" and "Gizmo").
• Our Founder: Space Sherif Gardan Iskor and his statue.
• Parental Abandonment: Ken, by his creator, following a winning lottery ticket. Duke, whose parents live abroad and don't even come back for holidays, just like Viper's Missing Mom.
• People Puppets: Viper used a magical ring and a literal puppet to Mind Control her cousin during a while when they were children, in order to do chores and make mischief. Then, after finding it again, she uses it on Hongo, in order to hook him up with Bibi.
• Pirates vs. Ninjas: In the What If? chapter, Duke says that being a ninja sucks, and he would rather be a pirate. But in the universe where he is a pirate captain, his schoolmates are stuck with the ninja idea and appear as such on the boat's deck. They suggest to be ninjas pirates, and Duke promptly answer that the concept is ridiculous.

• "Rashomon"-Style: In the last book, two chapters are about a conversation overheard by Bibi; when it's tell entirely in the second chapter the sense turn out to be completely different.
• Red Herring: Ken is Genre Savvy enough to once assume one about a crime's suspect, but also presume that it was an inverted Red Herring. He lampshaded it, explaining the suspect looked so suspect that it couldn't be him, but it was him anyway.("It's him so it's not him so it's him.") That's correspond, only with a longer name, exactly to The Un-Twist description exemple when inverted. Turn out that Ken was totally right in his assumption.
• Reference Overdosed
• Running Gag: The school keeps on exploding, due mostly to the five heroes. Also, Toa's name is mistaken for a pronoun, or when nobody notices that he was missing.
• School Play : Yes, it was Romeo and Juliet. Yes, Bibi plays Juliet. And... Tofu was Romeo, but Bibi plays a hundred differents tricks to make the scenario derail and end alone on scene with Hongo, who was playing Mercutio. Oh, and Koji was the tree.
• School Uniforms are the New Black: Sentai School and Villain's school ones have Color-Coded for Your Convenience. Bottom is clear for the villains, and black for heroes. And if in Villain's School all jackets are black, in Sentai School they're in a different color for everyone (fit with personality or Shout-Out to the original character clothes).
• Screams Like a Little Girl: A Freddie Mercury look-alike does this, making the students believing he was a Distressed Damsel.
• Shipper on Deck: Viper, for Bibi and Hongo. She even use a Mind-Control Device
• Shout-Out :So, so, so much, you can't count them. But trying to is half the fun.
  • The chapters titles, which ranges from "Saint High School Host Club" to "Resident Sentai".
  • The backgrounds and architecture: both the Sentai School and the Villain's School are modeled after anime starships.
  • Save the protagonists, every pupil and every teacher is another work's simultaneous Expy and Affectionate Parody. Among them are the Power Rangers, The Three Musketeers (from the 1987 animated series) , Saint Seiya, Ronin Warriors, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Wingman, and so on... As the school went co-ed, some Shojo series got their own, such as Lum, Sailor Moon, Creamy Mami... In Villain's School, look-alikes of Alberich of Megrez, Skeletor and Gargoyle.
  • Some sentences are quotes from old animes credits lyrics.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: Jayx and Lydia are an Affectionate Parody of this.
• Sixth Ranger: Bibi, then Viper.
• The Smurfette Principle: Bibi,at first. Soon after, both schools opened to girls students and Viper joined both the school and the group.
• Split Personality: Keiji/Dark Keiji, and "Villain Psychology" teacher Amamechu ("Anhairlocked") spoof of Kazuhiko Amamiya. His evil side is Stratequerre's spy.
• Super Hero: A lot, especially in volume 3 (chapter in New York).
• Superhero School: Hey, it's in the title! (With a villain academy just across the street.)
• "Super Sentai" Stance : An exam subject!
• Sweetheart Sipping: Under influence Hongo propose Bibi to do this by ordering a milkshake with two straws. The waitress traduce it by: "A stingy order".
• Team Chef: Toa. He's so good a Supreme Chef that his Christmas delicacies induced a Yule-themed Instant Cosplay Surprise for those who tasted it.
• Team Pet: Chibi Goldo.
• Temporary Love Interest: Angus, for Bibi. Extreme resemblance helps.
• Theme Naming: Some Heroes names are based upon Space Sherif's actors names, and names of series for surnames: Girara for Giraya, Jasper for Jaspion. Shinobi is self-descriptive. Food names for Tofu and Co (his bandmates are Curry, Soja and Wasabi, while his cousin is Takoyaki).
• Tinfoil Hat: A Tupperware box variant once occurred, because "It contained sacred eggplants."

• The Unintelligible: Being a Pokemon spoof, Chibi-Goldo speaks in non-words. Like all chibis anyway (Chibi-Zinger and Stratéquerre's pet, that looks like the very first monster seen in UFO Robo Grendizer). Bibi, because only a few words are big (loud) enough to be read (heard).And Kenshiro often replace some words in his sentences by "Grunt!"
• Unnamed Parent: Every single parent is unnamed, save Hongo's dad Ichiro.
• Villains Out Shopping: It's pure coincidence if , in the Beach Episode, Ultra sama ran into Stratequerre,Anaconda and his clique.They were in vacation at Jean-Yves's place, a villain buddy.
• What If?: A chapter in volume 4. We see pupils with reversed personnalities, in the future, as villains, as a Dungeons & Dragons party, as Comic Books superheroes, etc.

• Writing Lines: While doing it on a black board, Hongo say he find that ridiculous. Cue agreement from Bart Simpson next to him.

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