Let’s start off this series of questions with a big one:
What got you into Mangas in the first place?
For me, it was Neon Genesis Evangelion. I loved the Anime and it, naturally, left my still developing young teenage brain very confused. So when I learned that there was a “Comic” about it, I was convinced that it was going to provide some additional info the show left out (like books usually do). I didn’t like the black/white aesthetic at all at first and stopped reading halfway through the first volume initially, but picked it up again a few weeks later and practically devoured the whole series over the course of the next few days.
It didn’t really give me any of the answers I initially hoped for, but it definitely hooked me onto this whole “black and white comics for adults”-vibe I got from it back then. And I just never stopped picking up new ones for close to 20 years now.
Now, let’s hear your own background stories!
Faster content consumption.
We all suffered as kids when TV shows dragged for too long when the authors ran out of ideas — Dragon Ball Z I’m looking at you.
Manga cuts through all of that. You can simply skim through the filler much easier.
I’ll concede that, some times, manga slows down too. But it is orders of magnitude more tolerable than, say, anime.
The mangas that got me hooked where a combination of old and new: Junji Ito stuff, Berserk, Claymore, Chainsaw Man, The Way of the Househusband and Dorohedoro. I know that I just mixed some of the absolute best works of art that you could find in the format with totally mid and forgettable stuff, but that is the good thing about aging — you do not give a fuck.
My first manga was “Detective Conan”, as it was part of the German “Bild Comic Bibliothek” (comic book collection with various themes and artists) . From first sight I loved the accurate drawings and the tense, mystery stories. The great ideas, the hard to grasp Japanese culture and the humor of the cases were so special and unique to me that I never stopped reading Conan. Of course I also enjoyed watching the anime show and the movies.
Shortly after I found “Dragon Ball” and experienced the craziest fights in comic history (for me), it was clear, I am a not only a comic book but also a manga addict :)
Hard to remember as it is about 25 years since I had my first contact with Anime and Manga. I still remember that it was Sailor Moon, first the Anime then the Manga, which got me hooked and it still has a special place in my heart, but it was not my first Manga.
I think it was Naruto for me. I always liked watching the show on TV right after school, but the channel dropped the show or moved it to a time where I couldn’t watch it. Fast forward a few years, and a friend of mine and I went into bookstore while on a school trip to look for some new Fantasy novels (I devoured the Eragon Saga back then and was hooked for more :D). While browsing around we stumbled upon the manga section, and together we bought like 4 volumes or so. I read the entire Naruto story as a manga and a few others like Blood Lad, but nowadays if I read, almost always exclusively on my phone
Hmmm. I think it was years ago after rewatching the 2001 version of Fruits Basket and wanting to know what happened next. I’d watched some mainstream anime as a kid growing up, but hadn’t watched any in years. My wife got me to check out Fruits Basket because she loved it, so it’s kind of fitting that anime got me back into anime and also introduced me to manga.
