GON Vol.#01

By: Ben Leary
Review Date: Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Release Date: Wednesday, July 25, 2007



Creative Talent
Writer/Artist:Masashi Tanaka
Translated by:
Adapted by:

What They Say
Long before the dawn of man, savage dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Now, only one remains - the smallest, wildest of them all! Told entirely without words, Gon marches across the wilderness defending the friendly and furry from the mean and hungry.

This new edition is in right-to-left order, as it appeared in the original Japanese editions.

The Review
I knew as soon as I put this book down that the really difficult part of doing this article would be to write it without gushing. In short, this book has impressed me more than anything I've read this year.

The thing you immediately notice about Gon is the art. What really grabs your attention is the bold, copious, elaborate use of black. This isn't at all like the typical line-drawing style of comics; it's more like very high-grade illustrations for a novel, or even like the sort of drawings you see in a guidebook on animals. The artist, Masashi Tanaka, has an amazing gift. He can draw things that are maddeningly difficult from a purely technical point of view, such as fur and feathers and moving water; and he can also get a lot of emotion into the pictures through body-language and composition and lighting. The art even succeeds at the difficult but terribly important task of not drawing undue attention to itself. After you've finished the book the mind boggles at how much time it must have taken to produce so many drawings of this caliber. But while you're inside the story, it all goes effortlessly. It would be useless to say that Gon is "visually stunning," because that phrase has been overworked by reviewers to the point where it means nothing at all. Suffice it to say that I found myself going back and pouring over the drawings, just to marvel at them as pictures and take in all the fine details. I've never done that with any comic before. No, not even Akira.

I stress the visuals of Gon not only because they jump right off the page but because they are the only means used to tell the story. There is no dialogue at all--not even narration--and no sound effects. The only text you'll see at all are the titles at the beginnings of the chapters and the names of featured animals at the ends. The stories play out like some of the best silent comedy shorts, or perhaps even more like a Roadrunner cartoon or the early Tom and Jerrys. The limitation of having no dialogue is turned into a strength. It gives you story in its purest form, able to work directly on the imagination.


And our protagonist is the perfect sort of character for this kind of storytelling. A spunky little dwarfish T-Rex who has no hesitations about tangling with animals ten times his own size or flooding a forest to give himself a place to nap--this guy is 100% personality. He doesn't need to talk. There's nothing particularly complicated about the plots. Mostly Gon just gives some other animal a really bad day (usually deservedly, but sometimes through his own mysterious caprice). But the way it all comes to life so amusingly is priceless. The image that stands out in my mind as quintessential is the one of baby birds with their mouths open begging for food--and, there alongside them, Gon with his outsized mouth gaping in exactly the same pose. This is the stuff of genius.

And to top it all off, the wonderful people at CMX have released it at the unmatchable price of $5.99 per volume. Ladies and gentlemen, this is without a doubt the manga deal of the year. It's a gorgeous, funny, exciting, inexpensive, and entirely unique read. I give it my highest recommendation.