iBelgian Comic Strip CenterPentagone
Marks 30 years of manga publisher Kana with original artworks, some never shown outside Japan, for fans and newcomers alike.
On the original pages you can still see the pencil lines, the corrections and the notes in the margins. About forty of them hang here, some shown outside Japan for the first time, from the hands behind Naruto, Death Note, Slam Dunk, Doraemon and Goodnight Punpun.
The show marks 30 years of Kana, the publisher that brought much of this manga into French, and it pays tribute to its founder Yves Schlirf, who died in September. You walk through an imagined city of ten districts, sorted by what the stories do (action, emotion, memory, experimentation, views of society) rather than by genre or reader age. Between the pages, mangaka talk on video, some rarely seen in public and some anonymously.
It works for fans and for anyone who only knows the anime. Facsimiles hang alongside the originals, so check the labels. Tickets are 14 EUR for adults, and the museum is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 18:00.
Pages with the corrections left in
Look closely at the original pages for pencil lines, whited-out corrections and the artists' annotations, the working marks that disappear in print.
The ten-district city
The route is laid out as Mangatopia, a fictional city whose ten districts each stand for something manga does, from action and emotion to memory and experimentation.
The mangaka interviews
Video interviews with Japanese artists, some of whom rarely speak in public and some who appear anonymously.