LAST YEAR'S MODEL

Let’s talk about rad comics!!  You may know about Taiyo Matsumoto…I think he’s most famous for being the author of Tekkonkinkreet.  It was made into a pretty rad anime movie, too.  But what I wanna talk about today is his newest manga, GOGO Monster, which came out in December of 2009.

GOGO Monster by Taiyo Matsumoto

I can’t speak for Matsumoto’s entire body of work, but of the manga I have read, he tells stories in the vein of magical realism.  I’ve always liked this genre of story, and GOGO Monster is the pinnacle of the genre.  It tells the story of Yuki Tachibana, a first grader who believes that there is a battle going on in his school between good and evil spirits.  He also believes that the good spirits that he used to see are abandoning him, and that soon his insides will rot because of it.  Of course, all this is is a thinly veiled coming of age story where Yuki’s fight to stay in his magical world parallels his desire to stay a child forever and also serves as an excuse to keep himself apart from the classmates he despises.  And though I’ve just explained the story in a nutshell, to say that that’s all there is to it would be an incredible disservice to a simple but beautifully subtle and dream-like tale about the end of youth.

At the center of this is Matsumoto’s art.  He masterfully combines Japanese manga with a more western approach which is unlike any other comic book artist around (maybe the closest comparison would be Paul Pope?).  He plays with lines and shades in a way that is almost impressionism and perfectly suits the story’s union of the mundane and the magical.

"He thinks I should try harder to get along with the other kids. It's hard to talk about dumb things."

There are many strange and beautiful images in the story–planting flowers in the school garden is juxtaposed with lonely views of planes passing low over the school.  One minute Yuki is overhearing his simple minded classmates discuss vapid topics, the next he is lost on a nonexistent floor in the school looking for Super Star, the leader of his spirit friends.  Yuki says “The worst is yet to come”, and he warns his only friend to stay away before their classmates think that he’s a freak too.  But he sits on the roof and plays harmonica.  And he can see faces in droplets of rain.

And that’s really the best I can do to descibe it without giving it away.  It’s tailor made for lonley people.  And you wouldn’t be sitting here reading this on the internet if that weren’t a part of you at all, would you?  This book is rad.  And I hope you enjoy it.