Taiyo Matsumoto is a Japanese manga artist known for a distinctive visual style and genre-blending stories that have garnered both critical acclaim and international recognition. Born in Tokyo on October 25, 1967, Matsumoto initially aspired to become a soccer player before turning to a career in comics. He made his professional debut in 1987 at the age of twenty in Kodansha's Morning magazine. After struggling to find a wide audience there, he came into contact with an editor at Shogakukan who encouraged him to draw a boxing manga titled Zero, which was published in the magazine Big Comic Spirits between 1990 and 1991. This collaboration marked the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship with Shogakukan, where he would go on to publish many of his most celebrated works.

Throughout his career, Matsumoto has produced a diverse body of work that spans sports dramas, science fiction epics, and intimate character studies. He began his major breakthrough work, Tekkonkinkreet, in 1993. The series, which follows two orphaned street children fighting to protect their crumbling city from yakuza and foreign developers, became a success in Big Comic Spirits. This was followed by Ping Pong, serialized from 1996 to 1997, a sports manga about high school table tennis players that subverts genre conventions to focus on themes of friendship and self-discovery. In 2000, he began the surreal science fiction series No. 5 in Shogakukan's Monthly Ikki magazine, and later collaborated with writer Issei Eifuku on the historical manga Takemitsuzamurai, which ran from 2006 to 2010. His later works include Sunny, a semi-autobiographical story set in an orphanage that was serialized from 2010 to 2015, and Cats of the Louvre, a two-volume fantasy series issued in collaboration with the Louvre museum.

Matsumoto's work has been adapted for other media on several notable occasions. The 2002 live-action film Ping Pong was based on his manga of the same name. In 2006, animation studio Studio 4°C released an animated feature film adaptation of Tekkonkinkreet. A second adaptation of Ping Pong, an eleven-episode anime television series titled Ping Pong the Animation, was produced by Tatsunoko Production, directed by Masaaki Yuasa, and aired on Fuji TV's Noitamina block from April to June 2014. Additionally, his short story collection Blue Spring was adapted into a live-action feature film.

Matsumoto is recognized for an unconventional and often surrealist approach to manga. He draws freehand with sketchy, wavering lines that critics have described as aggressive or ugly, prioritizing psychological friction and raw emotion over polished beauty. His panel compositions frequently employ skewed angles, extreme close-ups, and fisheye lens perspectives to evoke sensations of speed, disorientation, or immersion. This style reflects the influence of French bande dessinée artists such as Moebius and Enki Bilal, as well as Japanese creators like Katsuhiro Otomo and Shotaro Ishinomori. His work is sometimes described as meta manga for its tendency to critique the genres within which it operates, whether deconstructing the tropes of historical samurai stories in Takemitsuzamurai or redefining the sports manga formula in Ping Pong.

Matsumoto has received numerous major awards throughout his career. He won the Japan Cartoonists Association Award for GoGo Monster in 2001. He received the Manga Excellence Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival for Takemitsuzamurai in 2007. In 2008, Tekkonkinkreet won an Eisner Award. He shared the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize with Issei Eifuku for Takemitsuzamurai in 2011. His series Sunny won the Cartoonist Studio Prize in 2014, the Japan Media Arts Festival Manga Award in 2016, and the Shogakukan Manga Award in 2016. He won a second Eisner Award for Cats of the Louvre in 2020. His significant body of work and unique artistic identity have solidified his reputation as one of the most original and influential manga artists of his generation.