On the face of it, the British Museum looks as imposing as ever. But inside its plush swing doors, I am cushioned in jaw-dropping grandeur under the tessellated glass dome. The first thing I notice is a row of glinting state-of-the-art wheelchairs. My wife Elise has barely strapped me in when a courteous, studious young man appears as if by magic — the curator Tim Clark — and wheels me towards a pair of massive doors, pushing me into a longish, squarish room full of painters and artisans. The crew is erecting a pictured exhibition dominated by giant images in black and white, of a massive bald-headed man in a black cloak and moustache — a kind of Sherlock Holmes meets samurai linebacker. This imposing figure is Professor Munakata, the brainchild and alter ego conceived 20 years ago by Japan’s leading manga artist, Hoshino Yukinobu.

You’ll be able to enter his world of manga, which is part comic and part art form, when you see this delightful exhibition, which opened yesterday. Being surrounded on five sides by sophisticated graphic art is like entering the magic world of “the Professor” himself. In the artefacts on display upstairs are the clues that our sleuthing hero follows.

Three newly commissioned works from Hoshino’s felt-tipped brush, drawn during his first visit to the museum last month (and first time out of Japan), grace the exhibit and launch the story — which, because of the friendship between the museum and Hoshino, has become one of sublime collaborative endeavour between Eastern and European traditions. There’s an English translation of the text that goes with the tale of the Professor and the British Museum, out soon as a graphic novel.

The professor’s adventures at the museum are excerpted in the exhibition in a series of framed 35cm paintings: Hoshino’s satisfyingly elegant black and white graphics, delineated with exquisite detail, shading and emotional subtlety. The cover art is rendered in full colour, orange-drenched and glowing like solar flares. We follow the professor in each frame as he shifts among revered locales such as the Izumo Grand Shrine and mythic beings such as the two-faced deity, encountering mystical challenges and making deductions — you can see him thinking in close-ups. He has an intelligent hot-babe assistant (delicious to look at, blown up to 5m) as well as an innocent niece with whom to consult. Explosive sound effects in Japanese calligraphy dance across the paper canvas like knife-edged Ninja boomerangs.

As for the British Museum artefacts featured in the professor’s quest, the ancient clay figurines (mostly female) are called “dogu” and possess a luminous, voluptuous power full of supernatural force. In the Shinto-influenced manga world, dogu figurines come to life and change size with ease. The glyphs on their bodies, the bulbous curves of their often armless torsos, the pillar-like legs are energy templates — harnessing and transmitting powers that can be fierce and frightening as often as benign. Dogu spirits come from the stars, it’s said. In our tale, the professor — in Indiana Jones mode — visits an aged female shaman of the revered sect of “itako”, whose members are always blind. The elderly blind shaman — with her historic ghost sisterhood of gorgeous, blind medicine women of uncanny talents — reveals the link between her lineage and the googly-eyed antiquity from the British Museum.

Manga translates as “brush run away with itself” and is a runaway pop phenomenon, crowding bookstores, newsstands, internet sites and comic conventions worldwide.

Youths “cosplay” — showing up as the manga character of their dreams. Don’t think you know any manga? How about Pokémon or Astro Boy? No one, it seems, is immune to manga — my wife is reading Because I’m the Goddess. I like steampunk (ie, set in the Victorian era) such as Mongolian Chop Squad or cyberpunk (high-tech and low-life) such as Fullmetal Alchemist. There’s fantasy, thriller, occult, comedy, Buddhist and Shakespeare manga. The manga aesthetic has spawned a film genre called anime, such as Spirited Away and the upcoming stunningly realistic TO, based on Hoshino’s sci-fi manga 2001 Nights (a combination of 2001, Dante and Arabian Nights).

Though it has humorous touches, Hoshino’s style is an evolution from early comic manga into more dramatic themes. I note the visually dynamic resemblances to film storyboarding. Hoshino won a top prize in his twenties for his first manga and moved to Tokyo. Now 54, he has written and illustrated much-loved manga such as Blue City, 2001 Nights and the prize-winning Case Records of Professor Munakata in the British Museum. “It’s like making mince with a machine,” he says. “I feed knowledge and information into my head, one after another, then turn the handle to see what kind of mince I get.”

In this exhibition, he gets a Ulysses-Samurai, a foxgod, 7th-century boats, a scholar’s library, a vicious deity with eight dog legs, a cape made of the Rosetta Stone, the map of Europe on a samurai helmet and a spooky clay deity with a heart-shaped face. Have fun.

Manga: Professor Munakata’s British Museum Adventure by Hoshino Yukinobu at the British Museum, Room 3. Free. Nov 5 - Jan 3

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