Masahiko Matsumoto

was a Japanese manga artist. He is considered a pioneer of alternative manga through his incorporation of cinematic techniques into manga from the mid-1950s onward. His style known as komaga, together with the manga of Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Takao Saito, was the catalyst of the gekiga movement.

Life Childhood and career start Matsumoto was born in 1934 in Osaka, Japan. Growing up, his father, who died in 1943, forbid him to read manga. In 1945, during the end of World War II, his family fled to Kobe. After the war, he subscribed to the magazine Shōnen Club and was interested in its illustrations, prose, and science sections. He began drawing during middle school and won a prize for an oil painting in 1949.

During this time, he also gained an interest in manga by discovering the works of Osamu Tezuka. He rented titles such as Nextworld from rental libraries. In 1951, Matsumoto visited Tezuka at his home in Takarazuka to get his autograph. Afterwards, he decided to become a manga artist himself. The first work he drew was the Tezuka-inspired science fiction manga Chikyū no Saigo ("When Worlds Collide") in 1952. While several publishers rejected this manga, the rental library publisher Tōyō Shuppansha proposed for him to draw another work, as they saw that science fiction manga were not selling as well anymore. This led to Matsumoto's debut work as a manga artist, the schoolhouse comedy Botchan Sensei, which was published in October 1953. Until 1962, he produced thousands of pages of gekiga. The atelier was short-lived; it disbanded in 1960 over internal divisions, but was important for the development of gekiga. His last published manga was the autobiographical manga Gekiga Bakatachi!!, serialized in Shogakukan's magazine Big Comic in 1979, which recounts his experience of creating the foundations for the gekiga movement together with Tatsumi and Saito in Osaka in the 1950s. From 1980 on, he focused his artistic career on papercutting.

He died of cancer in 2005. Publishers Weekly wrote: "He tells stories without complicated dialogue, often getting everything out of a panel through something as simple as emotive, onomatopoeic sound effects."

Legacy Manga scholar Ryan Holmberg credits Matsumoto as one of the pioneers of alternative manga through the development of komaga, but also says that it is a lesser-known term than Tatsumi's gekiga. Matsumoto was one of the first to use a consistent dramatic, rather than comic, story mode in his manga. Tatsumi was influenced by Matsumoto and they are considered to have been friendly rivals. Shōichi Sakurai, Tatsumi's brother and manga critic, called Matsumoto "the true innovator of gekiga and today's manga" in an article for Garo in the early 1970s. and Seirinkogeisha (Panda Love, Cigarette Girl, Gekiga Bakatachi!!). The 2009 Shogakukan reprint of The Man Next Door published interviews with Matsumoto as well as testimonies by artists Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Takao Saito, Hayao Miyazaki, Shinji Mizushima, Shigeru Mizuki, Ryoichi Ikegami, Kazuo Umezu, Yoshiharu Tsuge, Noboru Kawasaki and Tatsuhiko Yamagami. His work was translated into English, Cigarette Girl was nominated for the Prize for Inheritance at the 2011 Angoulême International Comics Festival. 1956 Published by Hinomaru Bunko in 1 vol. 1973 Published by Hibari Shobō in 1 vol. 1979 Serialized in Big ComicPublished by Shogakukan in 1 vol.