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. Tatsumi published the autobiographical manga A Drifting Life from 1995 until 2004 recounting his manga career and the emergence of gekiga, also as a response to Matsumoto's Gekiga Bakatachi!!. From the beginning of the 2000s on, Matsumoto's work gained a new appreciation and was re-edited in Japan by publishers Shogakukan (The Man Next Door) 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. In 2003, a gallery in Ginza created a solo exhibition of Matsumoto's work. Several galleries made solo exhibitions of his papercutting work. In the 2010s, he also gained international recognition: his work was featured in the exhibition Gekiga: Alternative Manga from Japan at The Cartoon Museum in London in 2014. His work was translated into English, French and Spanish. Cigarette Girl was nominated for the Prize for Inheritance at the 2011 Angoulême International Comics Festival. Selected works References 1934 births 2005 deaths Gekiga creators Manga artists from Osaka Prefecture People from Osaka Deaths from cancer in Japan