Gon Vol. #01 Manga Review

Creative Staff
Story/Art/Translation: Masashi Tanaka

What They Say
All the dinosaurs have gone extinct… except for Gon. Follow the adventures of this scrappy dinosaur as he encounters all kinds of creatures in the Tertiary period, and shows them anything they can do, Gon can do better. Without using any words, Masashi Tanaka tells the story of Gon, letting his beautifully detailed art do the talking.

Technical/Art
Tanaka’s front cover drawing of Gon is exceedingly cuter than the mean little dinosaur we encounter inside (more on that later) as he lounges on a branch and stares with his big ol’ eyes. The drawing on the back is a little bit closer to what we’re going to get, and the just-hatched bird mirroring his stare is simultaneously cute and scary. This manga has a low page count, but Kodansha still gave their new edition a nice, sturdy spine. The Kodansha Comics symbol on the spine is a little obvious, but it’s colored to match the rest of the cover’s color scheme.

The manga itself is highly, darkly detailed. Instead of filling in the space with screentones, Tanaka colors the pages with ink lines and cross hatching. This heavy shading lets readers see every curve on Gon’s body, and gives the impression of seeing every bit of dinosaur scale or animal fur. Tanaka also adds quite a bit of background detail from craggy mountains to a deep, thick forest, and this combines with the shading to give a lot of depth to the scenes.

Content (please note that the content portion of a review may contain spoilers)
The cover of this manga may have you thinking that our main character Gon is an adorable little scamp. The first chapter quickly proves that notion wrong, as we see Gon absolutely trounce a bear so he can take individual bites out of all the fish he caught, and then use the bear as a living bed. His selfishness seems to know no bounds as later in the manga he tears up every tree in a forest to make his own giant rendition of a beaver dam, and proceeds to flood whatever area might be left, leaving ever other animal out of a home. Gon appears to have at least some amount of fairness, like when he shares a part of his kill with a lion and helps an eagle family track down the bobcat that once attempted to kill one of the hatchlings. But he only feeds the lion after treating him like a horse, and it was his fault the eagle chick fell into the bobcat’s jaws to begin with.

There doesn’t seem to be a specific order to the chapters. First he’s in an American forest, followed by Africa, then back to the forest before the final setting on a mountaintop. And not even counting the oddity of a dinosaur in the Tertiary period, Gon is prone to a number scenes, like the aforementioned Gon riding a lion. The strangest bit comes in the last chapter: when the eagle chicks learn to fly, Gon learns with him, flapping his teeny arms at hummingbird speed.

It’s also worth mentioning that, aside from chapter titles and animal names, Gon is completely wordless. Each chapter is told silently, without even a single sound effect. While a completely wordless story can sometimes be hard to stomach, it works in Gon’s favor, not only helping it avoid the goofy talking-animal genre, but also leaving nothing to interrupt Tanaka’s fantastic art.

In Summary
Gon is definitely an odd manga, and I feel confident saying it’s one of a kind. The strange set up of the manga – Gon being the one surviving dinosaur – is never shown or explained, so the back cover summary is pretty necessary in figuring out the “why” of the manga. Not that you care too much about how this got started once the rest of the bizarre story begins. And while a lot of Gon’s antics are humorous – as strange as it was, I can’t get the image of Gon flying with those stubby arms out of my head – he’s such a jerk, and too good at everything, to be very likable as the main character. The art is the best part of Gon. While manga’s silence might turn off some readers, the amount of detailing that goes into Masashi Tanaka’s art is really astounding. Gon may be worth picking up and flipping through just for that.

Content Grade: B
Art Grade: A
Packaging Grade: A-

Age Rating: 10+
Released By: Kodansha Comics
Release Date: August 30th, 2011
MSRP: $10.99 US

Angela Sylvia

http://diaryofabookworm.wordpress.com

Angela has been writing about anime, manga and comics for the past few years, and her work can also be found on Manga Bookshelf and Creative Screenwriting. She recently received her MFA in Creative Writing for Young People from Lesley University.

See author's posts