TLDR
Overall: 3/10
Disclaimer: due to the nature of this work – a visually highly experimentalist manga – my normal parameters of Story, Art, Characters and Enjoyment with a weighted average won’t be applied. Instead, a global overview will be offered.
Gon is an experimental manga by Masashi Tanaka. It is a compilation of short, episodic stories with no dialogue, with a small dinosaur as a common thread, called Gon.
Not much can be said about this manga: although it is seven volumes long, one can read the entirety of it in a very short time. There are one-volume mangas that are longer than Gon.
These stories are also incredibly simple, and for good reason: there is absolutely no dialogue, not even a single speech balloon. The characters are the animals that Gon interacts with. Moreover, it lacks any semblance of plot.
The art style is functional and well-conceived, as it is the only medium of communication between the manga and the reader. Gon is also adorable. Animals and landscapes are drawn in a very realistic – and quite impressive – fashion. The manga also has good page composition and flow.
There are no characters, aside from the animals that appear in the stories, and thus, no character background, depth, or development.
Gon is certainly a quick read, but it doesn’t amount to much else, in all due honesty. It is boring and dull, and one certainly didn’t grow as a person or an otaku in reading this. It is an interesting thought experiment – almost like a radical-out-of-touch Tsutomu Nihei, a mangaka that uses very little dialogue as well –, but that doesn’t amount to much else. It is, without a doubt, unique, but again: this does not make it automatically good. One should read it for their education as an otaku, but one cannot conceive any other reason, for the stories ended up being uninteresting.
