When I was a kid, someone in my family rented Spirited Away. I loved it. I hadn’t even known the name of the movie when I sat down to watch it. I was mesmerized. Afterward, I don’t think I ever asked, or thought to ask, if there were other movies by the same director. Years and years passed before I was able to put a name to that magical movie I had seen, but the story, the animation, everything about it sat waiting in my mind to be rediscovered. It wasn't until some 10 or 15 years later that I saw Spirited Away for the second time and it all came back to me in a rush. There was an indelible impression it had left on me and my childhood memory. It was an amazing feeling, and I followed that up by watching every single Studio Ghibli film I could get my hands on one christmas break during university.

A similar thing has since happened with Taiyō Matsumoto's work. When I was probably 15 or 16, I watched Tekkonkinkreet with a friend. I remember her excitedly showing me the DVD case and me feeling somewhat skeptical. The drawings on it looked not as polished as other cartoons or as-of-yet-unnamed-magic-films I had seen somewhere in my distant past. Still, we watched it and I was stunned.

I never followed up on it. I didn’t even know that movies like Tekkonkinkreet were based on manga. 
Needless to say, here I am, again, more than ten years later, diving deep into the oevre of Matsumoto, reading pretty much every comic I can get my hands on. Thankfully, the library where I live is well stocked with his works, and in the past year, I've read Ping Pong, Gogo Monster, No. 5, Sunny, Cats of the Louvre, Tokyo these days, and I’m saving a re-read of Tekkonkinkreet for last.

Style

There's something unique about Matsumoto’s work that is inspiring and engaging for me. His drawing style is different from most manga comics I’ve read. It's loose yet refined and energetic; I have read that he draws freehand (which I think means that he's just drawing straight with ink on paper?). I was surprised by how “unpolished” his work felt in comparison to others— sometimes even seemingly childish (although for certain works, this is done to an intentional effect (see No. 5 and GoGo Monster)). As time passed and I read more of his work, I realized that such adjectives were crude and ill-fitting.

I’m often struck by characters that are drawn "reductively" with scrunched up faces, are “out of proportion”, or simplified.

I think part of me is in awe of this choice because I’ve regrettably internalized that a published comic should be…not like this? Over the years of studying drawing and thinking about getting "better" at drawing, I haven’t even thought about the stylistic choices to render something in a scrappier way. Of course, with Matsumoto’s work, these occasional "scrappy" panels are in juxtaposition to unquestionably polished and impressive panels.

I suppose seeing this gives me a liberating feeling toward what comics can be. As usual, there are no rules. 

Genre

Taiyō Matsumoto’s works feature flowing narratives that can be both fast-paced and temperate. What’s more, his works span several genres: sports, fantasy, slice-of-life, dystopian fiction, coming-of-age, among others. Works like Gogo Monster, Ping Pong, Sunny, and Tekkonkinkreet have a throughline of coming-of-age / childhood adversity, but all works seem to have a flush cast of characters where, by the end of the work, you feel like you’ve left an entire world behind. 
I recommend you take a moment to get into his work. There are so many interesting books that he's created. Some are quite fantastical, and others are slice-of-life, and I love all of it. I’d recommend starting with Ping Pong Vol. 1.

Growing up, I really didn’t like comics. Anything with superheroes turned me off. They were too stark, complicated, and visually overwhelming. If I had known I could have read a comic about a young, melancholic ping-pong star when I was a kid, well, I’d probably have read all of Matsumoto’s works much earlier.

Go enjoy!