Taiyō Matsumoto
is a Japanese manga artist. Career Matsumoto was born in Tokyo. Originally, he wanted to become a soccer player, but changed to artist as an occupation instead. After his initial success in the Comic Open contest, he began touring France in 1986, an event that became a significant point in his career. Matsumoto published his first manga in 1987 at the age of 20 in Kodansha's Morning magazine. While he published a few works there, he didn't gain enough popularity and was eventually not able to publish anymore in big magazines like Morning. Instead, he came in contact with Yasuki Hori, editor at Shogakukan, who pushed him to draw a manga about boxing, which became Zero and was published in the magazine Big Comic Spiritsbetween 1990 and 1991. In 1993, he began work on the Tekkonkinkreet manga, which became a success in the Big Spirits magazine, and published a series of short stories in a collection called Nihon no Kyodai that was publicized at the time by Comic Aré magazine. Ping Pong appeared in Big Spirits in 1996, soon followed by the series No. 5 in Shogakukan's Monthly Ikki magazine in 2000. The Tekkonkinkreet anime was released in Japan in