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Blue Spring (2004)
Published
Seven short stories about high school boys with too much time and nothing to lose: petty delinquency, fights that go nowhere and a dangerous game played on a school rooftop. This is early Matsumoto, before the big cities and the big casts, and the line is at its rawest and most restless, which suits the material.
It is the bleakest book here and the one to read once you already like him, because it shows the anger underneath the warmth of his later work. Viz's English paperback came out around the end of 2004, so a secondhand copy may be the easiest route.
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Tekkonkinkreet: Black & White 30th Anniversary Edition (2023)
Published
Two orphaned street kids, the hard-edged Black and the dreamy White, rule the rooftops of Treasure Town until the yakuza arrive with plans to remake it. The city is the real star: crowded, tilting panoramas where alleys bend and buildings lean as if seen by a child hanging upside down.
This is the book that made Matsumoto's name in English, winning the 2008 Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material, Japan. The 30th Anniversary Edition from 2023 collects the whole story in one 624-page hardcover and is the edition to buy. Read it after one of the friendlier entries if the style feels chaotic at first; it rewards a second pass.
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Ping Pong (2020)
Published
Childhood friends Peco and Smile play on their high school's table tennis team: one a showboating natural rattled by a loss to a stronger player, the other a blank-faced talent his coach believes could be great if he cared. Matsumoto turns a rally into pure motion, with bodies stretched and the ball smeared across whole pages, and it is as much about friendship and ambition as about scores.
Viz collected all five Japanese volumes in two thick books in 2020, based on the Full Game edition, and the set earned an Eisner nomination. If you read only one Matsumoto, this is the easiest way in.
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Gogo Monster (2009)
Published
Third grader Yuki is sure that unseen beings share his school, and his classmate Makoto sticks by him anyway. Matsumoto builds the whole book around a lonely child's inner world, using huge empty spaces, tiny figures and pages where almost nothing is drawn, so the tension comes from what you cannot see.
It is the quietest, strangest entry here, a single volume that works best read in one sitting. It won a special award from the Japan Cartoonists Association in 2001 and was nominated for the artwork prize at Angoulême. Viz's English edition arrived in 2009.
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No. 5 (2021)
Published
On a future Earth that has mostly turned to desert, No. 5, one of the superpowered guardians of the Rainbow Council, goes rogue with a mysterious companion called Matryoshka, and his fellow guardians are sent to hunt him down. This is Matsumoto at his most experimental: a science fiction chase drawn with the same loose, handmade line as his stories about kids, in a world that seems to invent itself as it goes.
Viz abandoned it after two volumes in 2002 and 2003. The four-volume omnibus published from 2021 to 2022 finally finished it in English, and it is the edition to read. Come for the design and the strangeness rather than tidy answers.
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Sunny (VIZ Media English edition) (2013)
Published
The children of the Star Kids home, a mix of group home and orphanage, escape their lives by climbing into the Sunny, a broken-down old car on the front lawn, and imagining they are going anywhere else. Matsumoto has said the series is not autobiographical but that parts are close to his own experience, and it shows in how exactly he draws a child's sulks, small cruelties and sudden bursts of joy.
It won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 2016. Viz published all six volumes in English from 2013 to 2016. Slow and episodic, it is his most personal work and a strong case for his finest; start here if you want feeling before spectacle.
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Cats of the Louvre (2019)
Published
A colony of cats lives hidden in the attic of the Louvre, unseen by the people below, and one kitten, Yukinoko, can slip inside the paintings. Matsumoto uses the museum as a playground for his gift for drawing small creatures in vast spaces, and the result is a gentle fable about art and time.
Viz's single volume from 2019 won the 2020 Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material, Asia. It is the softest book here and a good pick for someone who loves museums or cats more than manga.
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Tokyo These Days (2024)
Published
After 30 years as a manga editor, Kazuo Shiozawa suddenly quits, sure that early retirement is the only way to make up for his failures, and then finds that manga is not finished with him. Matsumoto's late style is calmer and more open than the early books, with quiet Tokyo streets and pauses that let each conversation breathe, and few comics have looked this closely at what making manga costs the people who do it.
Viz released all three volumes in 2024. The following year it won both an Eisner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for graphic novels. Best read after a couple of his earlier books, when the craft it talks about is familiar.
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