Umm, OK ... Where's The Funny?

Gon Volume 1
Kodansha Comics
Masashi Tanaka, writer and artist

I'm not quite sure what to make of Gon now that I've finally "read" one.

I've heard a lot about this Japanese manga series, most often being described as beautiful artwork and very funny stories about the title character, a tiny but ferocious dinosaur still around long after any others of his kind have gone extinct.

Early on, I learned that the series was without words — no word ballons, thought bubbles or captions of any kind — just pictures. It takes a certain kind of writer/artist to pull off that kind of comic effectively without leaving the reader feeling lost along the way, but I've read examples of the form done well in the past. For the most part, I feel that Masashi Tanaka is among the writer/artists who can pull this feat off. I followed each little story in this first volume of Gon's adventures pretty well.

But the series still leaves me scratching my head a little bit. All cover images I've ever seen of Gon look cartoony in their depiction of the title character and any others shown. That seems to fit with the funny tone I expected from the series based on past reviews and discussions of Gon. But the interior art doesn't match up. The interiors are beautifully, realistically illustrated so that the other creatures depicted look as if they could crawl or leap or fly right off the page in many instances. The situations depicted tend to be equally realistic and quite graphic at times. Anyone expecting a kid-friendly tale judging by the Gon covers is going to be very disappointed by the interiors and likely will have a child in need of counseling, or at the very least with an awful lot of heavy questions. These aren't Disney adventures by any stretch.

The image above, for instance, shows Gon and a lion sharing a wildebeest they have just brought down together. The U-shaped marks on the lion's forehead in the second panel (Remember, manga is read from right to left!) are Gon's teeth marks; Gon bites down on the lion's head and pulls its mane and slaps its back with his tail to control it while using the lion to bring down the wildebeest in the first place. That's kind of a darkly humorous scenario, I'll grant, but illustrated in a very realistic fashion that just leaves me confused how to react to this series.

Perhaps I'm being too narrow-minded, but it seems to me that the Gon series is a little confused about what it wants to be — cute and kid-friendly or serious and graphic — and ends up mixing the two together in a fashion I found a little disconcerting. I'm not that anxious to read the other six volumes of the Gon series at this point.