Is Gon Worth Reading?

Overview

Gon is a dinosaur. Nobody knows why he's still around long after his kind should have gone extinct, and the manga never bothers to explain it. What it does instead, chapter after wordless chapter, is drop this small, nearly indestructible creature into the modern wilderness and watch him demolish any animal that crosses him, from crocodiles to entire prides of lions, without a single line of dialogue anywhere in the book.

What it does well

Masashi Tanaka's art is the whole show, and it's extraordinary: richly detailed, almost photorealistic renderings of animals and landscapes paired against Gon's simple, expressive, cartoonish design. That contrast is doing real storytelling work, and because there's no text to lean on, every beat of comedy, tension, or sudden violence has to land purely through timing and composition. It does, consistently, which is part of why the book won international awards and reads just as well decades later. Each chapter works as a complete, self-contained story, so you can pick the book up anywhere and get a full experience in a few pages.

Where it falls short

Don't come to Gon looking for character growth or a plot that builds on itself; it's not interested in either. Gon doesn't change, the format doesn't evolve, and later chapters are, structurally, doing the same thing as the first one. Some entries are simply stronger than others, and without continuity to carry you through a weaker chapter, that unevenness is more noticeable than it would be in a plotted series.

Verdict

Gon earns its reputation as a genre landmark. It's a book built entirely on visual craft, and it pulls that off well enough to need nothing else, making it one of the most purely accessible, universally readable manga ever published.