Taiyō Matsumoto

Taiyō Matsumoto

Taiyō Matsumoto ( Japanese 松本 大洋 , Matsumoto Taiyō ; born October 25, 1967 in Tokyo Prefecture , Japan ) is a Japanese manga artist . His works are aimed primarily at an adult readership and can be assigned to his genre.

biography

Beginnings

Taiyō Matsumoto wanted to become a soccer player, but after reading Katsuhiro Otomo's manga The Suicide Paradise , he decided to pursue a career as a comic artist and did not begin to draw seriously until he was studying literature at Wako University . Since he admired the comic artist Seiki Tsuchida and he worked for the manga magazine Morning , he decided in 1986 to send his first work to this magazine. The Kōdansha publishing house wanted to establish a sister magazine to Morning at this time , Afternoon , and was looking for new talent for this. Matsumoto won the Afternoon Young Talent Award , the Shiki Prize , in 1987 and shortly thereafter published his first work as a professional manga artist with Straight . In this comic he dealt with the sport of baseball .

Career

At the end of the 1980s, after the publication of his debut work, he went to Europe to report on the Paris-Dakar Rally for Morning . In Europe he gained new influences and found inspiration for his drawing technique, especially in French comics. Matsumoto sees Miguelanxo Prado as a role model , but also Moebius and Enki Bilal . He applied the style, which was greatly changed by the trip to Europe, to the manga series Zero , which he created in 1991 for Big Comic Spirits magazine. Then the Shogakukan publishing house, for which he has mainly worked since then, also published the manga in book form. As in Straight , the author placed people who play a sport in the foreground of the story, this time boxing . Also for Big Comic Spirits , he drew the 700-page Hanaotoko in three books the following year , which, like Straight , focuses on baseball.

The Aoi Haru short story collection followed . In most of the seven stories included, Matsumoto describes the lives of high school students who feel harassed by Japan's tough school system. Some of the figures are modeled after former classmates of the draftsman. He drew one of the short stories in Aoi Haru in collaboration with the well-known comic author Caribu Marley . Another short story volume Matsumotos published the publishing house Magazine House 1995 with Nihon no Kyōdai . Some of the nine manga short stories in Nihon no Kyōdai were previously in the manga magazine Comic Are! published.

The breakthrough came with the manga series Tekkon Kinkreet , which ran from 1993 to 1994 in about 600 pages in Big Comic Spirits and then appeared in three edited volumes; the anthologies have sold over a million copies in Japan. In Tekkon Kinkreet , Matsumoto paints the picture of two boys who use violence to gain power in a city of the near future. The manga was implemented as a play and in 2006 as an award-winning anime film.

From 1996 to 1997 Shogakukan brought out five volumes of his manga series Ping Pong . Unusually for mangas, these had not previously been published in a magazine, but came out in book form. For the first time since Hanaotoko he devoted himself to a sports manga with ping pong . This was nominated for the Osamu Tezuka Culture Prize in 1997 and 1998 , has around 1000 pages and was filmed, like Aoi Haru . After the publication of the two art books 100 and 101 and the single volume Go Go Monster , which won the 2001 prize of the Association of Japanese Cartoonists , Matsumoto concentrated on his longest work to date, Number Five . The 1,100-page manga series in eight books could be read in Ikki magazine from 2000 to 2005 . The science fiction thriller takes place in a desert landscape in the future. From 2006 to 2010, Taiyō Matsumoto worked with Issei Eifuku on the manga Takemitsu Samurai .

With Sunny , based on his own childhood, he created a series for Ikki from 2010 to 2015 about everyday life in a home for foster children in the 1970s. Although it is autobiographical, Matsumoto refrains from calling Sunny that because he is not interested in depicting his childhood as accurately as possible. In 2015 he won the Shogakukan Manga Prize for the series.

Private life

He lives on the coast of Enoshima . He discovered the place where he lives while researching the locations of Takemitsu Samurai . Matsumoto is married to the cartoonist Saho Tōno . She advises him and sometimes assists him in coloring illustrations.

His mother is the writer Naoko Kudō . His cousin Santa Inoue is also a well-known mangaka .

International reception

His work will be translated into English, Spanish and French, and Tekkon Kinkreet was the only one of his works to be published in German by Cross Cult Verlag in 2019 .

In the USA and France he won awards for his works: In 2004 and 2006 he was nominated for Ping Pong and Go Go Monster at the French Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d'Angoulême in the category Best Drawings . Tekkon Kinkreet won the 2008 Eisner Award for the best US edition of an international comic.

Works

• Straight ( ス ト レ ー ト , Sutorēto ), 1987
• Zero , 1991
• Hanaotoko ( 花 男 ), 1992
• Aoi Haru ( 青 い 春 ), 1993
• Tekkon Kinkreet (鉄 コ ン 筋 ク リ ー ト , Tekkon Kinkurīto ), 1993–1994
• Nihon no Kyōdai ( 日本 の 兄弟 ), 1995
• 100 , 1995
• Ping Pong (ピ ン ポ ン , Pinpon ), 1996–1997
• 101 , 1999
• Go Go Monster (GOGO モ ン ス タ ー , GOGO Monsutā ), 2000
• Number Five (ナ ン バ ー フ ァ イ ブ , Nambā Faibu ), 2000–2005
• Takemitsu Samurai ( 竹 光 侍 ), 2006–2010
• Sunny , 2010-2015
• Les chats du Louvre ( ル ー ヴ ル の 猫 Rūvuru no Neko ), 2016–2017
• Tōkyō Higoro ( 東京 ヒ ゴ ロ ), 2019

literature

• Masanao Amano: Manga Design . Taschen Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-8228-2591-3 , pp. 466-469

Web links

• Official website at Shogakukan (Japanese, requires Flash)
• Profile at lambiek.net (English)
• Interview with Matsumoto ( Memento from August 3, 2004 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Mangav.com
2. ↑ ^{a b} INTERVIEW: Taiyo Matsumoto (1995) | Comics212. Retrieved March 28, 2020 (American English). 
3. ↑ manga beyond mainstream ( Memento of the original from May 17, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ^ ^{A b} Anne Ishii: The 'Sunny' side of Taiyo Matsumoto. June 18, 2013, Retrieved March 28, 2020 (American English). 
5. ↑ INTERVIEW: Manga Creator Taiyo Matsumoto. In: Crunchyroll. Retrieved March 28, 2020 . 
6. ↑ Taiyo Matsumoto “Original works from“ Iru jan (I'm here) ”“. Retrieved March 28, 2020 (English). 
7. ↑ Taiyô Matsumoto - Cross Cult - Comics & Novels. Retrieved March 28, 2020 . 
8. ↑ Viz Media's Tekkonkinkreet by Taiyo Matsumoto Wins 2008 Eisner Award. In: Anime News Network. Retrieved March 28, 2020 (English).