Dantastic Thoughts on Manga

Like a lot of guys my age, my first exposure to anime and manga was through properties that were dubbed and sanitized for an American audience.  My first taste was Battle of the Planets around the time I went to kindergarten.  From there, we went to the Big Two:

Voltron

And Robotech.

And that was pretty much it for a while.  I recognized the style of artwork but had no idea what it was called.  For a few years, my only other exposure to manga and anime-style art was in video game magazines.  Like I've said a few times recently, people have no idea how hard manga and anime was to find in the pre-internet era.

A fateful thing happened sometime in the early 1990s.  Apparently Mile High Comics sold their mailing list to Bud Plante because suddenly I had a Bud Plante catalog that opened up a whole other world for me.  Suddenly, I was aware of tons of manga I'd never heard of before.  

And things quickly fizzled since I was a kid with little to no money.  I accumulated what little manga I could find at the comic shop and the local flea market.  I eventually gave up.

Fast forward a couple decades.  Manga and anime are everywhere, even some Wal-Marts!  A friend of mine is super into anime and made me watch an episode of My Hero Academia.  While it wasn't my thing, it did whet my appetite.  

There is so much manga out there it's hard to know where to start.  In the past month, I've read volumse of Appleseed, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Getter Robo Devolution, and others.  Here are my thoughts in the infancy of my manga self-education.

1. I love the faster pace.  American comics move at a snail's pace these days.
2. Learning to read from right to left is hard when you're in your forties but I'm getting used to it.
3. It's not all giant robots fighting other giant things.  Those are actually kind of rare.  Hell, Mazinger Z hasn't even been adapted in English.
4. Manga has such a diverse range of genres, as opposed to American comics where 99% of the comics published feature super heroes.
5. Some things inevitably get lost in translation.

And that's that, I guess.  I'm looking forward to continuing my manga education in the years to come.