The phenomenon of Japanese manga comics appears to constitute one of those rare historic occasions when innovative art connects with the popular consciousness of a nation. Manga are sold on the streets, read on trains and generally come in the form of long serials, so an exhibition of enlarged sequences can give only a diluted taste of the cheap but profound thrills of the originals.
Exhibition curator Fusanosuke Natsume's concern to play down manga's notoriety for violence and explicit sex might seem a cop-out. Yet there are enough transgressive desires here to be going on with. One character keeps a penis in a goldfish bowl. In 24 Hours Ago, Tezuka Osamu's comic-paranoiac manga character the Man relates how "Every 24 hours another one of me appeared. It began to get on my nerves... But what a hassle to strangle them one by one."
The best of manga matches sociological insights with a graphic inventiveness of fractured perspectives. That sounds posh but the great thing about manga is that it isn't. The comic-frame format and the reduction of text to brief snippets gives manga an air of urgency and excitement.
"Uhhhnn! Uhhh! Uhnn! Ah!! Uhh!" That's five frames from Umezz Kazuo's The Old Man, a story of the meeting between an innocent child and an earth monster. Sasaki Maki presents the everyday adventures of a blob-face in a suit who repeatedly utters the challenge "Your true nature!" as he comes across various grotesquely drawn creatures. This is genuine surrealism, not mere weirdness-for-effect.
Some of the most convincing dream poetry here has a remarkable graphic simplicity. One frame of Mori Masayuki's Ear Walking shows nothing but pen-and-ink dashes accompanied by the text, "He listened and listened to the rain." Elsewhere visuals are super-detailed and trippy, with texts that appear to have been penned by some fellow-spirit of David Lynch. Taniguchi Jiro's Walker has to carry a rolled-up screen through a dense forest, having imbibed something that turns his surroundings into a mess of organic confusion. Don't forget, travellers to manga-land: the comics here read from right to left.
• Until June 24. Details: 0161-200 1500. Tour includes Derby, Brighton and London.
