GOGO Monster // Taiyo Matsumoto
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.
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