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. Komaga and gekiga After creating several more comedies, he published his first non-humoristic work in March 1954, Botchan Tantei ("Kid Detective"), with publisher Hinomaru Bunko. He drew both full-length books as well as short stories for Hinomaru Bunko's mystery anthology Kage ("Shadow") from its first issue in March 1956. Kage is considered the first mystery manga magazine in the rental library market. His work became a catalyst for the manga movement komaga ("panel pictures") due to its innovation in importing visual motifs from cinema. The term komaga was conceptualized as a new form of comic in opposition to the term "manga" and started appearing on the covers of Matsumoto's books and short stories from 1956 on. Komaga is considered a precursor to the term gekiga ("dramatic pictures"), which fellow Hinomaru artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi created a year later. For one month in the summer of 1956, Hinomaru Bunko arranged for Matsumoto, Tatsumi and Takao Saito, to live