Gogo Monster

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Youth can be an incomprehensible and overwhelming deluge of new ideas and emotions. This sensation is most certainly heightened in the place that they amalgamate and coalesce: at school. Everyone has a different way of adapting to this, but they generally all fall under a similar guise: children simply try to fit in the best they can through the emulation of their peers. But then there’s people like Yuki Tachibana.

Elementary schooler, Yuki, goes his own way by instinctively distancing himself from the sheer inscrutability of youth. He perceives school life in a very different way than most. As Yuki sees it, there’s an assemblage of ... monsters working behind the scenes who are the cause of every major development within the school. When a kid almost drowns, Yuki surmises that the monsters were trying to pull him down. Even something as innocuous as a slight change in the students’ collective behavior is the clear result of the monsters’ manipulation, according to Yuki. Furthermore, because he acts out on these visions, he is ostracized by his peers and treated as a delusional kid in need of help by most of the school’s staff, leading Yuki to dismissively regard most adults as ‘rotten,’ thoroughly alienating himself in the process.

But Taiyo Matsumoto, the mangaka responsible for Gogo Monster, isn’t quick to reveal whether this is a truly supernatural occurrence that only Yuki is privy to, or if it’s all imagined in a subconscious attempt to rationalize his peers’ incomprehensible behavior. This duplicity is depicted in a masterfully expressionistic style that puts the reader into the same mental space as Yuki Tachibana. Drops of rain are given faces, people mutate into monsters, and the entire geography of the school evolves with its students’ collective worldview. Matsumoto’s line work is very sketchy and expressive, creating an suitably surrealistic atmosphere. When Yuki’s mental equilibrium takes a turn for the worse, the line work becomes hastier and the proportion of Yuki’s surroundings become progressively more skewed and abstract. Matsumoto also employs a very cinematic style, making use of frequent pillow shots and filmic pacing. This style is very characteristic of Matsumoto's work, but it's especially at home in Gogo Monster. All things considered, Gogo Monster is an unique and engaging experience start to finish, and that is in no small part due to Matsumoto’s idiosyncratic craftsmanship.

This unique presentation is hardly a novelty though, as it is all for the benefit of carrying out Gogo Monster’s proportionally peculiar story. In essence, Gogo Monster is Yuki’s coming of age story, albeit a very surreal take on the theme. Whether real or imagined, the monsters are the catalyst for Yuki’s growth as a character. Taken as a supernatural story, the monsters can be seen as an obstacle only Yuki can overcome, and becoming a stronger person in turn. Yet taken as a psychological story, one could easily view them as a defense mechanism employed by Yuki as a means of rationalizing his classmates’ behavior, or even a means of coping with his loneliness - some emotional problems that Yuki will have to overcome. It might even be a combination of both. In order to completely immerse the reader in Yuki’s world, the audience is only meant to understand as much as Yuki does. All of these lines of thought are equally poignant and intriguing, but it doesn’t become evident until the story’s beautiful resolution which is true - most of Gogo Monster is spent building its immersive atmosphere. What is consistent through this build up, though, is that it presents a rare insight directly into something as abstract as the mind of a youth coming into its own, and an incredibly distinct one at that.

Thankfully, Gogo Monster’s story isn’t nearly as impenetrable as this might suggest. The school’s caretaker is one of the few adults who is not ‘rotten' and provides a very valuable role model for the impressionable Yuki. Having worked at the school for many years, he has known many people with outlooks similar to Yuki’s - kids with a “special talent for seeing things the rest of us can’t see” - and is very sympathetic towards Yuki’s worldview, but he also hints that it is something Yuki will grow out of it soon. There’s a palpable uncertainty to the nature of Yuki’s visions, so the presence of the caretaker - a sympathetic and more objective third party - is in many ways the anchor that holds the story together, making Gogo Monster’s story a far more balanced and less overwhelming experience overall. Another source of balance can be found in Yuki’s few acquaintances, Makoto and IQ. Makoto is one of the few ‘normal’ kids who dares to reach out to Yuki in a rare attempt to truly understand what lies beneath his eccentric demeanor. Befitting of his name, IQ is a genius who's characterized by a similar proclivity to be a bit of an oddball recluse. He even hides his head in a box, which grows in size relative to the general conduct of his schoolmates, as a sort of defense mechanism. Being in a somewhat similar situation as Yuki, they find solace in each other at key points in the story. These three characters are paramount in instigating Yuki’s growth as a character and establishing a relatively neutral equilibrium, both for Yuki and the story as a whole.

At the end of the day, Gogo Monster flawlessly marries a complex coming of age story with an equally compelling presentation. It’s a rare example of something where its form truly reflects its content, and while both are something worthy of admiration on their own, the effect of them working in tandem as perfectly as they do is nothing short of awe inspiring.

The loneliness of being a misunderstood child is unfathomable.

I've only read a bit of “Sunny”, and watched “Ping-Pong: The Animation” from the same author. They're some of the greatest pieces of “Life” stories I've ever seen put to ink and brought to audiovisual art-form. It's strange to see a person who can depict, and really depict what a person, a kid, a teenager, or an adult, even an old man, are going through. Every age group, and person has a certain level of wisdom or knowledge we don't, or feel like we lost to time. “Gogo Monster” is about that which we might have, we ... might believe in, we can still be in touch with.

A kid, Yuki, is that black sheep of the classroom. The kid nobody wants to deal with, the weird one, strange, incomprehensible. We actually watch the story from his, and a transfer student's, Makoto's, perspective and how their friendship blossoms with the true hardships of trying to understand people at such a young age.

To preface, the story is plenty abstract, but not impossible to understand. Filled with symbolism that ultimately is about Makoto trying to understand Yuki. At the beginning, he stays around him because he knows how to tolerate that which he can't get. Curiosity, interest, or comfort, he finds Yuki to be someone who's not all that odd if you think about it. Nobody is odd, nobody is normal to begin with. Life is filled with diverse personalities, and some kids actually are themselves, and only gravitate towards people who like a person being themselves. They're open to sadness, though. Yuki is that embodiment of putting your true feelings in front of you out of rebellion. Conforming to the world is so complicated to some people who can't understand others.

In that sense, the story isn't just about being misunderstood, but about not wanting to understand, or be understood in a cycle of sadness. All Yuki needed wasn't someone who could literally get everything he's going through clinically. IQ, a kid with a box on his head, breaks Yuki's personality open like a book being opened through the spine. You won't be able to read its contents, you just lay bare the interior with no order, or magnitude. You require someone who's willing to look at your cover and take you in from the synopsis. A love which can only be given by trust, and knowledge of what you might be, not what you are.

We go into Yuki's literal psyche, and how Makoto explores it in a vast, comforting, yet, brutal way. Friendship is about trust, and equally, about opening yourself to be hurt. Why must pain be involved? Because we care, we're hedgehogs seeking warmth, thorns and all. Things will hurt, specially as kids, isn't that truly sad, yet, beautiful? To find friendship in the utmost core of humanity, to find that a kid, regardless of circumstances, is good, and he found another good, albeit, very different kid.

The art captures the abstract, the surreal, the wholesome, but its drawings stay with you. The nice old man who you keep remembering, the kid you used to be friends with, and the others you grew out of. Taiyou Matsumoto can create real life people, in the strangest of places, and understand what makes them tick. What makes them happy, and be able to demonstrate it without them saying it. A face, a panel, you know they're holding it in, and they don't say it, but you know it, they know it, and the other person knows it. A masterpiece of emotional, human writing coming from a simple, even if layered, story about kids and how hard it is to reach out and perhaps be accepted.

9.4/10. I believe the beginning was a bit confusing, but man. This thing is just so good.

If you want an easy-to-understand, fast-paced plot; look elsewhere. Gogo Monster follows elementary schooler Tachibana as he is ostracized from his class due to acting out over creatures that only he can see. The readers are shown his delusions and there are many panels which focus on the ambiance, which adds to the surrealist tone.

There are only a few characters, but they're pretty well fleshed-out, and you can understand the way they think very well by the end.

The artstyle is a little rough, but surprisingly detailed. It really matches up well with the main character's doodles of what he sees.

There's only a few chapters, ... but each chapter is very long, in the order of 90 pages. It took me about 2 hours to read in total.