My first encounters with manga, anime, and games came from home when I was just a few years old. However, it wasn’t until I was nine years old that I became more interested in reading manga. It was easy to get excited about the series when my friends around me were reading the same ones as me. Through reading manga, my interest expanded to include anime, Japanese music, and a general fascination with Japanese culture. (b. 1996)
I was eleven years old. I spent the summer with my family at the cottage, and it was a tradition for us to visit the local library to borrow things to read for the vacation. It was there that I happened upon the first volume of the series Ranma ½. I had heard of manga before and remembered seeing the name of this particular series somewhere, so out of curiosity, I decided to borrow the paperback for myself, as I already enjoyed comics and eagerly consumed French-Belgian comics like Asterix and Tintin. However, in the black-and-white manga comic, there was something stylistically and narratively that I hadn’t encountered before, and I immediately got hooked. I read the manga I borrowed from the library over and over again until I knew it inside out. From then on, I used all my meager weekly allowance on manga paperbacks sold at R-kioski and markets. (b. 1993)
I must have been just elementary school age, around 8 years old, when I first read manga. The first series I read were probably Tokyo Mew Mew, Inuyasha, Silver Fang, Detective Conan, Fruits Basket, and Chibi Vampire Karin(?) If I remember correctly. The first manga I read all the way through was Inuyasha, my best friend collected it, and the rest I mostly borrowed from the library. We also found the anime episodes of these online and ended up watching them together with my friend. (b. 1999)
My older sister liked manga when I was very young, (maybe 6) and got me interested too. I basically learned to draw just from manga drawing books. Fan art led me to read Japanese manga comics. (For example, Tokyo Mew Mew, My Hero Academia, etc.). Most of the manga I read also had an anime, which led me to watch anime. (b. 2009)
Now over 20 years later, it’s probably safe to say that manga never gets boring, because there’s always something new and unexpected to discover, even though at some point you might have thought you’d seen it all. Maybe those eternal battle series from Shounen Jump don’t resonate with me the same way they did when I was 16, but there’s so much more to manga that I’m never afraid of losing my enthusiasm. (b. 1985)
I got introduced to anime when I was 9 years old (1999) through Pokémon and Digimon, when they started airing on Finnish TV. I immediately got interested in them because of their gripping plots and art style. I got into manga when I was around 10 years old (2000), when I found Ranma ½, Inu-Yasha, and Magic Knight Rayearth on my cousin’s bookshelf. I loved drawing, and the art styles of these series struck me like a thousand volts. Through these series, I truly started to become interested in manga and anime. I started feverishly searching for more manga and anime and taking inspiration from them in my drawing. I still read a lot of manga to this day and feel that manga has significantly influenced my drawing, both in terms of individual images and comics (b. 1990).
When I was about five years old, I borrowed a bunch of drawing books from my older sister (the ones that teach you step by step how to draw characters, I always loved them) and learned to draw from them. By the way, my sister still hasn’t gotten her books back, and over the years, I’ve expanded that collection. Then I heard that manga wasn’t just about drawing stylized art but that there were also comics available even in Finland (at the age when comics interested me, quite a decent amount of manga had already been translated into Finnish), and from there, my love for manga grew. (b. 2009)
