The new Manga book about the British Museum (& also involving the Parthenon Marbles) has now been published in English.

From:
Guardian

The British Museum: marbles, murals… and manga!
Meet Professor Munakata, the crime-fighting archaeologist who saves one of London’s best-loved institutions from looters
Mike Pitts
Sunday 14 August 2011 19.59 BST

With its crumbling pillars and fading frescoes, the British Museum isn’t the first thing you’d associate with Japanese graphic novels. So it’s a slight surprise to learn that the museum will soon publish its own manga-based book.

Professor Munakata’s British Museum Adventure was serialised last year in Japan and has now been now translated into English. Its star – a portly ethnographer-cum-archaeologist who solves crimes and explains civilisations – is already well known to millions of Japanese readers, who follow his exploits in a series of Hoshino Yukinobu-penned comics. Hoshino’s work is blend of science fiction and thriller, layered with a rich mix of western and Asian myth and history.
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In a story that has uncanny parallels to the (rejected) April 1st EDM by Andrew George MP in 2009, a Japanese Manga comic is serialising a story based on the repatriation of treasures from the British Museum – in exchange for other British artefacts that are held hostage.

From:
Economist

The professor to the rescue
A cartoon strip takes on the repatriation of treasures from the British Museum
Aug 26th 2010 | tokyo

“THE Stonehenge megaliths have been stolen!?” So exclaims Professor Munakata at the outset of a rollicking adventure set at the British Museum, in the form of a manga, or Japanese cartoon. Over the past five months, readers of Big Comic, a Japanese fortnightly magazine, have followed the exploits of the fictitious ethnographer as he gets embroiled in a bizarre plot to force the repatriation of the museum’s prized objects.

The strip, called “The Case Records of Professor Munakata”, was introduced 15 years ago by Yukinobu Hoshino, one of Japan’s most notable manga artists. Portly, bald and impeccably dressed with cap, cape and cane, the professor is Japan’s anti-Indiana Jones. He does not invite danger but bumbles into it. The strip does not follow any set formula but takes on serious issues.
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