Manga - the Japanese art of comic books - has greatly in popularity worldwide in the past few decades. The art form can its roots back nearly 1,000 years in Japan but it only in recent times that it has off globally. Manga now as synonymous with Japan as sushi, geisha and Mt Fuji. Such the popularity of manga outside Japan, an exhibition of manga works to be the most popular show at the British Museum in 2019. It more visitors than a show on the Dutch painter Rembrandt. The manga exhibition was the largest display of manga material ever outside Japan. Around 1,920 people to see it every day, according to the museum.
The manga exhibition the 900-year history of the art. It the earliest forms of manga by master painters to sketches and illustrations of today's popular anime and video game characters such as Pokemon. There also exhibits from animated films as "anime". The show 70 manga series, including Osamu Tezuka's seminal work "Astro Boy". Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum, said: "Manga is the modern graphic art of storytelling first in Japan and is now all over the world. Building on Japan's centuries-old tradition, the best manga have the visual power to us and us into their world, with inventive storylines that our emotions."
