Manga Exhibition at the British Museum

We'd been saving up since they announced it at the start of the year and last Wednesday we went to the Manga exhibit at the British Museum.  To get it as cheap as possible we booked the train in advance so we had no idea it was going to be in the middle of a heatwave and that our train home would be super hot, busy and delayed by an hour but hey! it was fine, we just took it easy.  

We were very excited (and hot).

Photos were allowed in the exhibit except for a few pieces and I have tried to credit everything but a few things got forgotten, sorry!

Miyuki-chan in Wonderland by CLAMP

Sitting on the floor with our soysage roll packed lunch before the exhibit which had this beautiful CLAMP piece in the opening area.

The exhibit covered a kind of history of manga so there were old pieces right up to new work. The second picture here is from the choju-giga (scrolls of frolicking animals) which is said to be the oldest manga and the first image is from Gigatown by Fumiyo Kono which uses the animals from the choju-giga to explain all the different symbols (manpu) used in manga.

Look at this grass!

(this whole post might just be me shouting "look at ___!!"...)

Takao Saito

I was very excited to get to see up close lots of screentone and white ink. It's not surprising that an exhibit at a museum would have original pieces but it was very very very exciting to me to get to see original drawings. Prints can obviously look absolutely amazing but the original is almost always better and to me is always more interesting. You get to see how an image was made in a way that you can't once it's been cleaned up for print and as someone who draws it's super interesting and a good way to learn new things. (I'm sure it would be super interesting even if you don't draw!)

Blank Canvas: My So-Called Artist's Journey and Princess Jellyfish by Akiko Higashimura

Dragon Ball by Akira Toriyama

Tomorrow's Joe by Ikki Kajiwara / Tetsuya Chiba

Look at this cross hatching!! It's so curved and beautiful! And you can see the use of white to tidy up the edges💖 The hatching on the body is beautiful too.

The Warrior Saito Daihachiro by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi / Blue Giant Supreme by Ishizuka Shinichi / Katsuhiro Otomo

A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Astro Boy by Osamu Tezuka

The Astro Boy pieces were, unsuprisingly, amazing. Just look at them, look at them!

So good!

Screw Style by Yoshiharu Tsuge / Chi's Sweet Home by Kanata Konami

Dragon Ball by Akira Toriyama

I thought my favourite thing was going to be seeing all the uses of white for mistakes and highlights and it was amazing but also amazing was seeing the original blacks. Like how around an edge would be blacked out with one pen and the bigger areas then filled in with a different pen and you could see the different black inks, you could SEE IT and it was amazing. And like in the above dragon ball if you look closely you can see the "black this bit out" marks through the black and it's magic. Getting to see actual original pieces was so magic. I haven't stopped thinking about it since we left.

Sailor Moon by Naoko Takeuchi

This Sailor Moon piece was actually a copy, not the original but it wasn't cleaned up so it looked just like the original and I nearly cried.

I would like to live where shops look like this please😭

Shintomi theatre curtain by Kawanabe Kyosai

This curtain was incredible. It was one of those moments when you can't help but think "it must be a reproduction, surely it's not the actual piece" and you have to remind yourself that that's what museums do, is look after actual things and you feel lucky and just wow.

Here's the blurb from the museum "On 30 June 1880, artist Kawanabe Kyosai went to the Futami photography studio in Tokyo's Ginza district, downed several bottles of rice wine and set to work with a hemp-palm broom. Four hours later he had finished the curtain, signing it as "a picture done on the spot"(sekiga)."

Four hours drunk. Incredible.

I tried to film it too, it's much more than these three pictures. I'll add the video at the bottom.

Colossal Titan from Attack on Titan / Tomorrow's Joe drawn by Tetsuya Chiba

Please stare intently at the shore line and how the use of harsh black and white makes it look raised off the page even though it isn't, it's just magic.

Toward the Terra by Keiko Takemiya

So beautiful💖😭

Uzumaki by Junji Ito

Ok. I didn't know there was going to be any Junji Ito there. There were multiple pieces. They were perfect. They had a printed version of that first page with the wooden lids next to the original and you read the book or look at the print and think "wow this art is amazing" but honestly seeing it in real life is something else. It is stunning. None of my photos do anything justice (because of the whole, originals look better than reproductions thing) but the Junji Ito pieces just, I don't even know how to explain it, they were incredible. It was something special to get to see them. And you know how I was saying about how cool it is to see all the white used? Yeah it was also pretty magic to see how he barely used ANY because he's surely not real, like wow.

Also, I'd only just got over fearing spirals but thanks british museum, you horrified me all over again.

Keiko Takemiya

"This is a copy of a notebook used by Takemiya to explain the story of the Kaze to Ki no Uta to her editors. It illustrates the first section of the manga and conveys Takemiya's design process and her fluid drawing style."

Look. At. The. White. Over. The. Blue. It. Is. So. Beautiful.😭

Love love love these trees.

Naruto by Masashi Kishimoto

I've only read the first volume of Naruto but when I did I intensely fell in love with the artwork. I kind of just let it go because the next available volume at my library is the 10th I think and there's lots of other stuff I can just wander in and pick up so it fell into the depths of my "one day I'll read it" list BUT look at it😭I'll definitely be putting in a lot of requests at the library soon because it's just so beautifully drawn, I love it.

Naruto / JoJo's Bizarre Adventure by Hirohiko Araki

If I didn't already like public transport this advertising campaign would 100% get me on board with it, it's so pretty.

This middle piece is a poster used at the train station near Comiket one year reminding people to make sure they have the correct fare on their travel card so as to not cause queues.

These catalogues from Comiket were amazing. I want them. I want to stare at all the tiny images of all the available at the time but probably not anymore and definitely not to me in the uk work. I both really want to visit Comiket one day because it seems amazing and am also kind of scared of the scale of it. How do you decide which of the doujinshi to buy? How?!

Detective Conan by Gosho Aoyama

Look at how the screentone goes up into the black of his fringe. Lovely.

Drawings of drawings is a special favourite. And also patterns inside bubble writing💖

Iris by Kitajima Yoko

This is so cool and strange and beautiful but when I tried googling more about it nothing really came up except pinterest pages. I will have to spend more time researching, a lot of this exhibit has given me a lot to look up actually.

Rohan at the Louvre by Hirohiko Araki

So beautiful and I need to know more about that guys face being a book.

So pretty, look at all the lovely white usage :)

Chubby Pikachu is best Pikachu.

In the middle of the exhibition (but we came back to it at the end) there were bookshelves full of manga, tankobon and magazines.

I've never seen any of the manga magazines in real life before and I can't really explain it but this was really special for me. Whenever I see pictures of these magazines my hands just cry out for them and I finally got to have a rummage. Not for as long as I would have wanted because we spent hours in there and I mentioned the heatwave, I was getting a pretty bad headache but any amount of time was fine to me.

Look at this Deku!! Is he Mothra? Why is he Mothra? We recently started watching My Hero Academia and it's another one I'm going to have to badger the library for (shonen volumes have a tendency to go missing out of my library) and it was pretty cool that out of all the Shonen Jumps that exist, and all the ones they had on these shelves we happened to pick one up that had this in it. I love it so much.

So beautiful😭

I don't know if it's just in shoujo magazines or just that's where I've seen it but I'm so in love with the coloured pages. I knew it was a thing from photos online and was already kind of obsessed with it but to see them in person, *sighs*. The use of a single colour instead of black and different colours through the magazine and how some are even on coloured paper too. Argh, I tell ya, this exhibit has got me itching to make stuff, drawings stuff.

Red on yellow paper! Us, sweaty and hungry and very very happy. I wish I'd bought these Naruto socks so much.

I got some postcards, if there had been even more designs they'd have made a killing from me but I'm very happy with the ones I did get.

Also want to mention but wasn't allowed to take photos of:

There was a video playing of the Shonen Jump offices and it was so cool. It was part of a section about how a lot of manga production includes people other than the artist and they'd put a static camera in amongst the desks and it was really nice to get to see in there, with all the stacks of previous issues and bits of Shonen Jump merch dotted around on everyone's desks. I'm so nosy so I love seeing stuff like that.

The end pieces of the exhibition were made especially for it. Three big drawings, probably about A1 size, of portraits of Togawa, Nomiya and Takahashi, characters from REAL by Inoue Takehiko. They were so cool, the level of skill and detail in the drawing combined with the huge size made for really awesome end pieces. There was also a video showing some clips of him drawing them which I love, I could watch videos of people drawing all day and it was really cool to see the video and then get to look at the actual pieces.

Here's my video from the day. I didn't even try to make a coherent vlog, I just tried to film things so I could look back at it later. There are some bits filmed that I also have photos of but there's also some bits in the video that I don't have photos of. Plus we wandered around Soho for a bit after the exhibit so there's clips from that too.



The exhibition is on until 26th August and if you can go I strongly recommend it. And if you can't I hope you enjoyed my attempt at sharing my visit😊

I dream of a world where I can go to more exhibitions for illustrative things, manga, comics, anime and cartoons, all of it. I want to stare at originals and storyboards and special one offs. Fingers crossed because getting to press my face up against these ones (almost literally) was even better than I thought it would be.