GOGO Monster

I really like Taiyo Matsumoto. The only work of his I wasn't a particular fan of so far has been Cats of the Louvre, which I thought was a bit too much style over substance and dream-like for me. Also I feel like when I read it, I wasn't really.. reading it. Sometimes that happens to me lmao.

GOGO Monster, however, hits all the right spots. Back to my regular programming, a coming of age story. How many of these have I read and praised so far... many. I never get tired of it! I'm not even the type of person that gets mentally stuck in their high school days, as I wasn't even a huge fan of them when I was going through them. In fact, I'm way happier as an adult. And I have a lot more thoughts in my head? Sometimes I feel like I was barely conscious during my teens. But there's just something man.. something about growing up and transitioning into an adult person with all kinds of fears instilled into you by your imagination or society... It's something everyone has to go through. The idea that adults lose something special as they age, that they turn rotten and black is definitely not an uncommon one, and it also appears in this manga.

The story revolves around two (three?) middle school aged boys. One of them is normal, seems to fit in with the rest of the kids but despite that he remains friends with the second kid, who is an outcast, albeit with good grades. He sees a world that doesn't exist, and fears losing it as he ages. He's friends with the third kid that wears a box on his head. He on the other hand seems to be a total outcast, choosing to mostly hang around the rabbit pen in their school. I like how the three of them represent a certain spectrum of weirdness lol. I feel like this manga is pretty thematically similar to something like Alien 9, although it's a lot less focused on the onset of sexual maturity, and lacks the fighting, of course.

One thing I really enjoyed about this manga was that, even though it wasn't a horror manga at all, it introduced such classic horror elements that were the perfect amount of disturbing.. Like when the teachers face turned upside down. Or the idea of a secret 5th floor in a building that only has 4 and a roof. God I love stuff like that. I've had reocurring dreams since childhood where I would run up the stairwell in my building trying to reach my floor to no avail, so I'm a sucker for any media with a similar premise in it. Any kind of secret space that isn't physically there but you can accidentally find yourself in, infinitely repeating spaces... I love love it.