Go-Man: Champion of Earth | Review

Go-Man: Champion of Earth
Writer/artist: Hamish Steele
Union Square Kids; $24.99

Cartoonist Hamish Steele’s Go-Man is a love letter to Japanese pop culture, most specifically its giant monster movies and Super Sentai and Ultraman TV shows. Steele liberally borrows inspiration from these to concoct an original story that still manages to feel fresh, even, perhaps unexpectedly, unique.

This is thanks in large part to the fact that all of the colorful ingredients serve a story of personal drama, involving the sorts of characters we don’t often see explicitly represented in media that much.

Steel’s protagonist is Tobi, a friendless young boy who lives in Model City 3, one of several futuristic cities maintained by constantly-repairing-things robots, cities that were built specifically to be resilient to attacks by giant monsters, a now-common occurrence.

Despite his young age, Tobi lives alone, his scientist mother having died and his very important, very busy father living on the moon for work. But he does have a smart house full of smart appliances to watch over him, and he’s downloaded his mother’s super-advanced computer into a toy robot monkey named Okidoki.

Those giant monsters I mentioned are actually referred to as “Giant Organisms”, or “G.O.s” for short, and Tobi’s mother was researching how they came to be before her death. She discovered it was through ingesting a glowing flower called mana and, in the midst of a G.O. attack on his way to school, Tobi consumes his mom’s only mana sample, growing to skyscraper size (and gaining a costume in the process), becoming a G.O. human…but “Go-Man” is a lot more catchy, isn’t it?

Shortly after, Tobi makes his first real friend, Grace, a classmate who is obsessed with a Sailor Moon-like TV show and is also Go-Man’s biggest fan. Once she discovers Tobi’s secret, she helps coach him on being a superhero, which of course involves poses, catchphrases, and a theme song.

In addition to his controversial new role as a super-hero—some think he’s just another G.O. to be fought and destroyed—Tobi must navigate his fraught relationship with his absent father, wrestle with the politics of the color-coded team of heroes who pilot insect-themed giant robots to fight the monsters, deal with an alien incursion, and try to adjust to having a friend.

Though the back cover and the solicitation copy refer to Tobi as autistic, this doesn’t actually come up until very late in the book, when Grace off-handedly refers to the two of them as “the two autistic nerds in class”, and Tobi is surprised to hear that word.

This leads to a short, awkward conversation, concluding with Grace saying, “Look, I can’t diagnose you, but in my humble, autistic opinion, you definitely seem to have a few obvious traits.”

This gives new meaning to Tobi’s reference to Go-Man as “just a face I put on” for the world (one side effect of which is that it completely physically exhausts him), and Grace’s mention of the real her versus a mask she wears.

There is quite a bit yet to be resolved by the end of the book—including a cliffhanger involving Tobi’s bully and a baby G.O.—but then, there is a “Volume 1” on the book’s cover.

Despite all of the obvious influences from Japanese pop culture, this is very much a western comic book, presented in brilliant full color and with steady, straight, square panels that flow at a regular, leisurely pace from one to another. Steele also steers clear of stereotypical manga storytelling elements, like speed lines, sweat drops, veins denoting anger and so on.

The cast is also remarkably diverse, populated with all sorts of people with various skin and hair colors, suggesting different ethnicities and nationalities. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the make-up of the RoBug team, the Super Sentai-inspired mech pilots and monster fighters. Rather than looking like five identical people in color-coded costumes, they have a remarkable variety of traits for a type of team known for its uniformity, ranging from the short, blue-haired Caucasian guy with bad-boy stubble who pilots RoBug Blue to the big, tall, dad-bodied Black guy with a full, bushy beard who pilots RoBug Pink.

Rather than manga then, Go-Man looks and reads more like a modern Western cartoon show, albeit one that plays out on paper rather than a screen. It all makes for a rather delightful all-ages comedic adventure comic.

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