Manga is the Japanese narrative art form which shares many similarities with Western comics. In Japan, narrative art dates back to the Edo period (17th - 19th Centuries - European Enlightenment through to the start of the Industrial Revolution), but the artwork generally considered to be the start of it all - 'Handscroll of Frolicking Animals' dates back to about 1200 AD (the height of the European religious wars of the Middle Ages).
In the 19th Century, various Europeans arrived in Japan and introduced western style newspapers and parody magazines. After World War II, America pushed its culture heavily into Japan. The Japanese traditional arts met Mickey Mouse in the mind of Tezuka Osamu, and modern manga was born.
We now also have anime - the moving picture version, and of course video games like Pokémon.
The key difference between manga and Western graphic novels is that manga is very much showing the story in pictures, while a graphic novel shows images relating to the story and relies heavily on dialogue and narration to explain what's going on.
My personal introduction to manga came via anime on British TV - 'Battle for The Planets' and 'Robotech' were favourites. Then I saw 'Akira' one night at Glastonbury Festival and that was me done for. It didn't take long to track down the first volume of the manga, although there wasn't a second volume for many years - in the late 80s there was no market for it!
In spaaaace!
The exhibition starts with an introduction to manga via the reinterpretation of Alice in Wonderland. This works well as it's a known fantasty story with well-defined imagery and you can therefore relate to the manga versions.
After that there's a section explaining how to read it (right to left, top to bottom) and what the various icons and visual effects mean. Amusingly, the example of a multi-page manga supposed to show how it all fits together has been put together out of sequence and is chaotic. All these poor people who thought they understood what they'd just been shown were suddenly back to square one.
There was then a section on history, featuring Tezuka Osamu's 'Astro Boy' and various of his other creations. He is the man behind 'Kimba The White Lion', the story of an orphaned lion cub who grows to be king of the jungle. Which just shows that the Disney/manga influence went in both directions. Tezuka is also credited with introducing TV anime when he animated 'Astro Boy'. He was a one-man industry in the 50s and there isn't a manga artist since that doesn't cite him as an influence.
The exhibition looks at the various genres and sub-genres of manga, sometimes showing entire short stories. Hagio Moto's 'The Willow Tree' was one - a beautiful piece of work running for 20 pages, only three of which have dialogue. There's sport manga, porn manga, journalistic manga, relationship manga covering every permutation and level of intensity you can think of, horror manga, time-slip manga... and so on.
They covered a lot of well-known modern manga, like 'Dragonball', 'One Piece', etc. but no 'Akira' or 'Ghost In The Shell' nor much from the 80s, which I thought was odd.
There was a shrine to Studio Ghibli, where brief clips from all the films were balanced with short documentary segments that gave insight into the creative processes.
The use of original art (genga) was fascinating - you could see where bits had been cut out and moved, or Tippexed out. Sometimes there wasn't even text in the speech bubbles.
There was even a bookshop where you could flick through Japanese editions of various manga and go online to read translations direct from the publishers.
The pictures I took only scratch the surface, and the exhibition is merely an overview of the topic. The exhibition catalogue - the size of phone book - goes into greater detail and has more material and is beyond argument the best exhibition catalogue I've ever bought.
In short, come down to London over the next three months and visit the British Museum. If you can't make it then order yourself the catalogue and set aside a wet weekend to travel around the world in black-and-white.
Music manga. Layout sketches, genga and finally the English-language version.
Gag manga. This does not need translating. Remember the pages go from right to left, as do the panels.
The last page is worth giving the translation for...
It's embedded in this page, which also links to a couple of excellent introductory articles.
All artwork is copyright the artists. All the photos were taken by me, of material marked okay to photograph.
