together in Osaka in order to increase their productivity, and this became a space of artistic exchange between the artists. At the same time as other manga artists publishing at Hinomaru Bunko, Matsumoto moved to Tokyo in 1957. With Saito, Tatsumi, and five others, he founded the atelier Gekiga Kōbō in 1959. They started publishing the magazine Matenrō as a creative platform for the movement. 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. Late career In the mid-1960s, he slowed down his pace and shifted his career to seinen manga, publishing gag manga like Panda Love (1973) and more personal works. 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. Style Matsumoto was strongly influenced by Tezuka at the beginning of his career, especially Tezuka's focus on story rather than humor. Unlike Tezuka, Matsumoto drew more elongated characters and made his stories consistently dramatic without comic elements, which Tezuka had included in all of his works. Matsumoto developed the term komaga ("panel pictures") to describe his style in opposition to mainstream manga ( "whimsical pictures"). Matsumoto imported visual motifs from cinema, especially film noir, and drew inspiration from crime literature by Edogawa Ranpo, Seishi Yokomizo, and the Tarao Bannai series for his detective and mystery manga. He used low-angle shots, metered breakdown, metered montage, and chronoscopia ("time-watching") in order to provide a film-like experience. Manga scholar Mitsuhiro Asakawa points out the frequency of scenes showing train crossings in his early komaga that are meant to evoke an "excited feeling". Shea Hennum says his later style in works like Cigarette Girl is characterized by short-limbed characters with abstract faces resembling caricatures, as well as urban background drawings. 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.