The Japanese comic series “Sunny”, by Taiyo Matsumoto, about life in a shelter for children, begins to be published this month in Portugal, with the Devir publishing house. "Sunny" is a manga series (a designation for Japanese comics) originally published in 2010 in a magazine in Japan, and later condensed into six volumes, whose edition now reaches the Portuguese market. with more than 400 pages, it presents a gallery of characters composed mainly of children, who live together in a foster home, because they have been orphaned or abandoned by their parents. The narrative begins with the arrival of a new boy, Sei, who is received among indifference and strangeness towards other children.
In the story, Taiyo Matsumoto draws the relationships between all the inhabitants of the shelter and the individual anguish due to the absence of parents, the growing pains, the day-to-day at school. The point of refuge for all of them is “Sunny”, an abandoned car in a lot next to the shelter and in which the children forget about reality. In an interview in 2015, Taiyo Matsumoto said that he always wanted to draw this story, because he himself lived in foster homes for a few years, but he rejects that “Sunny” is completely autobiographical. Matsumoto, aged 56, published his first comic works in 1987 in Afternoon magazine. At that time “the discovery of European comics, at the age of 20, opened up new perspectives and influenced both the thematic variety of his work – which transits between sports, family comedy, social stories or science fiction epics – and the artistic style”, refers the publisher Devir in a biographical note.
From the work already published by the Japanese author, “Tekkon Kinkreet” (1993) stands out, a BD also starring two orphans, already adapted for animation, “Ping Pong” (1996), which had the right to be transposed to film in real image , and “Les chats du Louvre” (2017). Taiyo Matsumoto has several awards, including one for excellence in manga, in 2007, in Japan, and an Eisner, in 2020, in the United States.