Text be Gon!

In the early heydays when Manga was being trotted out, one of the early properties that was picked up by the so-called "Big Two" of comics was the silent dinosaur comic, Gon.  The dense illustrations being their major selling point for anyone who happened to like seeing nature scenes interjected with miniature Popeye-strength dinosaurs.

And even though the story could still be understood well enough, they still felt the need to insert page-length essays to validate purchasing these quick-read volumes to adult customers who would've wanted something worth reading to stimulate their minds, not having gotten enough out of the pantomime actions themselves.




If you really think that reading silent comics is an easy thing, check out the massive book, 2000 Comic L'association, filled with 2000 pages of nothing but silent comics from all over the world, each with their own different beats and rhythms, and see if taking a casual 'read' through that monstrous brick is an easy experience.

Future printings have gone away with the expositionary introductions, but there's still something charming about the need to insert commentary where none is really needed.






The ironic part is that while the first essay compared the kidification of dinosaurs to be little more than merchandisable toys to be sold to children, Gon has become something of a mascot himself, making cameo appearances in fighting video games.  If you look at the character design, Gon is basically a Chibi Godzilla.






If you have the more recent printings, chances are you've probably noticed that some of these chapters are slightly out of order.  (Also compare the similarity between the title covers, "Gon Builds a Mansion" and "Gon Glares") This was to subtly hide the still-budding artwork by surrounding the early stories with later ones, and also cover the early installment weirdness when Gon was acting more like a jerk to his fellow animals.






I'll be honest with you - the rough treatment that Gon sometimes conveys towards his surrounding animals makes me uncomfortable, and amount to animal abuse.  Usually, all it takes to suffer Gon's wrath is incurring a crime as simple as trying to eat.  Even when predators deserve whatever disproportionate retribution they've incurred over the length of dozens of pages like some kind of Fletcher Hanks villain, I can't stand to see them suffer.




Everybody seems to enjoy wanting more realistic graphics while playing video games, but I couldn't stand to look at the violence of something as basic as Double Dragon, simply because the 8-bit sprites was too 'realistic'.  I could stomp on face-sized mushroom heads with no problem, and take a sword to land octopuses and spear-chucking goblins without impunity.  But smacking a human being with blunt physical force was more than I could handle.


Another slight difference between the American version and other foreign publishers was that at the very end, there was a participating illustration accompanying the last page.

Somehow, this pun was abandoned in a later printing to display Gon's toughness:

In the original Japanese, this normally static pose was just one of several accumulative stances that ultimately ended up with the titular dinosaur spinning faster and faster.







This is the last known image I was able to find.  If Gon continued to spin any faster, he'd probably approach the speed of light, creating a force equivalent to the Hadron Collision Collider.