Wanted: Cheap Manga

Panda Love - by Matsumoto Masahiko.

So, yes, this is Cheap Manga’s first scanlation. Panda Love is a single volume work by the gekiga artist Matsumoto Masahiko. He is a contemporary of Tatsumi Yoshihiro (gaining popularity recently by Drawn & Quarterly’s publication of his short stories, “The Push Man,” and “Abandon the Old in Tokyo”) and Saito Takao (creator of Golgo 13). In fact, they formed a studio together around gekiga.

Looking into Matsumoto’s other works, he was a hardcore gekiga artist like Tatsumi Yoshihiro. He wrote stories of hard-boiled realism and pathos. Panda Love was written later, after he produced most of his realistic gekiga. It was during a time when Matsumoto was mostly producing adult-oriented gag manga. The characters in these manga are much more realistic, poor, and dirty. The stories are focused around a final gag.

Enjoy, there will be more coming. There’s also an afterward and interview that I will be translating, and additionally an interview in an issue of Ax that I’d like to translate.

Download Chapter 01 by clicking this link. (5.03 Mb)

Or page by page:

untranslated cover
translated cover
page 01
page 03
page 04
page 05
page 06
page 07
page 08
page 09
page 10
page 11
page 12
page 13
page 14
page 15
page 16
page 17
page 18