His work became a catalyst for the manga movement komaga ("panel pictures") due to its innovation in importing visual motifs from cinema.
Komaga is considered a precursor to the term gekiga ("dramatic pictures"), which fellow Hinomaru artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi created a year later.
!, 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.
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.
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".
[1] 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.
[7] 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.
From the beginning of the 2000s on, Matsumoto's work gained a new appreciation and was re-edited in Japan by publishers Shogakukan (The Man Next Door)[9] and Seirinkogeisha (Panda Love, Cigarette Girl, Gekiga Bakatachi!!).
[10] The 2009 Shogakukan reprint of The Man Next Door published interviews with Matsumoto as well as testimonies by artists Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Takao Saito, Hayao Miyazaki, Shinji Mizushima, Shigeru Mizuki, Ryoichi Ikegami, Kazuo Umezu, Yoshiharu Tsuge, Noboru Kawasaki and Tatsuhiko Yamagami.
In the 2010s, he also gained international recognition: his work was featured in the exhibition Gekiga: Alternative Manga from Japan at The Cartoon Museum in London in 2014.