This exhibition occupies the British Museum’s biggest exhibition gallery, the purpose-built space where it has previously shown colossal Egyptian statues and the sinister splendours of Assyrian palaces. How can you fill that space with comics? It turns out you can’t. There are pages isolated on huge walls in painted splattery bubbles, display boards showing more comics, and blown-up scenes hanging as banners. It looks drab and silly. The fact that Manga uses black and white doesn’t help. An inflatable head from the comic Attack on Titan seems sad by itself, as if it got lost here while all its companions headed for a theme park.
If you are going to pander like this, you need to really go for it. The V&A has turned exploiting the lowest common denominator into an art form with its ecstatic celebrations of style and music icons. It’s probably to the British Museum’s credit that it seems so uncomfortable in this pursuit of pop glory. This exhibition may prove too fussy for real manga fans, but could appeal to their parents, who can quickly learn some of the basics of the genre. It’s constantly deferring to what it thinks are the rules of the big mass culture out there. Do we really need the section on costumers who love to dress as manga characters?
I’m not knocking manga or its fans, but what has it got to do with the British Museum? We go there to have our eyes opened to artistic and historical wonders, not to get more of what’s on offer everywhere, 24/7. This exhibition is a tragicomic abandonment of a great museum’s purpose.
