Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei Doujinshi and Comics
Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei (Japanese: さよなら絶望先生, Hepburn: Sayonara Zetsubō Sensei, lit. Goodbye, Mr. Despair) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Kōji Kumeta. It was serialized in Kodansha's Weekly Shōnen Magazine from April 2005 to June 2012, with its chapters collected in 30 tankōbon volumes. The series follows Nozomu Itoshiki, a teacher who takes all aspects of life, word, and culture in the most negative light possible. The series satirizes politics, media, and Japanese society. The manga was adapted into three anime television series and two sets of original video animations (OVAs) animated by Shaft between 2007 and 2010. In 2007, the manga received the 31st Kodansha Manga Award for the shōnen category.
Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei revolves around a very pessimistic high school teacher named Nozomu Itoshiki who, at the very beginning of the series, tries to hang himself on a sakura tree. He is saved by an extremely optimistic student known only as Kafuka Fuura (though in her effort to save his life, she almost kills him). She explains to him that it is simply unimaginable that he would hang himself on such a nice day, especially in front of such beautiful trees. She decides to nickname Nozomu "Pink Supervisor" (桃色係長, Momoiro Kakarichō), and offers to pay him fifty yen to call him by that nickname. After having enough of the strange Kafuka, Nozomu bolts to the school and starts his homeroom class, but the attempt to escape was in vain as he finds that she is one of his students. Not only that, but Kafuka is just the tip of the iceberg, due to each and every student in his class representing a new personality quirk or bizarre obsession, posing challenges that he must overcome in spite of himself.
Each chapter or episode of the series revolves around a particular aspect of life, Japanese culture, or a common phrase in the Japanese language. Typically, this involves the subject being taken either to its most logical extreme (a discussion of amakudari, the practice of "descending" from the public to the private sector, results in Nozomu "descending" until he reaches his previous life), or taken literally (in Nozomu's family, omiai, normally a meeting between a potential match in an arranged marriage, is instead a marriage made official by eye-contact). On other occasions, Nozomu challenges his students to think about the negative aspects of something usually considered positive. These in-depth, off-kilter analyses (along with the reactions of the students according to their own personality quirks) are usually brought to a head with a punchline based on the overall premise, or more rarely, a non-sequitur gag or piece of fan service.
While ostensibly set in the present day relative to its original serialization, the manga uses a variety of aesthetic tropes that evoke the Taishō period, the relatively liberal period in Japan before the rise of militarism in the Shōwa period. Many aesthetic aspects are meant to evoke Taishō liberalism, Taishō Romanticism (see Japanese literature) and Taishō arts (see Hanshinkan Modernism). This is exemplified by Nozomu and Matoi consistently wearing a kimono and hakama (an obsolete style of Japanese school uniforms in the late 1800s), but is also evident in stylistic choices such as the anachronistic appearance of architecture, vehicles, and technology indicative of the Taishō period. However, the fashion of women typically follows the modern girl trend, which is a break from the Meiji period and signifies the style of the Taishō period.
Chapter titles are oblique references to literature, modified to suit the needs of the chapter. The chapter title pages are drawn to resemble karuta cards, with an illustration in a silhouetted kiri-e style. The anime carries this further through a washed-out, grainy visual style that mimics film, and frequent use of katakana (rather than hiragana) as okurigana. The anime also regularly refers to the date as though Emperor Hirohito were still alive, such that Heisei 20 (the twentieth year of Emperor Akihito's reign, or 2008 by the Gregorian calendar) becomes "Shōwa 83".