Once upon a time, what seems many years ago now, the internet wasn’t available in peoples homes. The online world was made up of bulletin boards and if you were lucky you could access one of these from your school library computer and you could talk to some other kids in a far off school in a far off country.

Back in those days I saw an advert in a magazine. I can’t remember the magazine, all I know was it was in a pile with many other magazines in our school art block. Our project at the time was to take images from the magazines, carefully wet them and then “print” them onto a blank sheet of paper and make new images. I opened this magazine and there before me was an image I just new was right for me. It was advertising a new Video (For those too young to remember, VHS is what came before DVD ). I tore out the image, carefully wet it and transferred the image onto my piece of paper. I then carefully left the image to dry and kept it.

What was this image advertising? Some porn snook into a Sunday paper magazine? A horror film I could get my friend’s older brother to rent for us? The latest collection of Transformers episodes?

Nope, it was for a film called Akira.

This was my first exposure to the phenomenon that is known as anime, or at least I thought it was. The image of Kaneda superimposed over a city with the words “2019. NEO-Tokyo is about to EXPLODE” dragged me in and wouldn’t let go. It was nothing like the cartoons I was used to seeing. I had to see this film. The company advertising the video was “Manga Entertainment”. Manga, hmm, that was a word I’d heard whispered around the school corridors. Then I noticed something, the rating on the film was a “15″. I’d never seen a cartoon that was rated a 15 before. How could a cartoon possibly be only suitable for over 15s? I was around 12 at the time and already some of my friends had decided they had outgrown cartoons, what kind of cartoon could a 15 year old possibly want to watch?

Around the same time a bunch of new computer magazines had popped up, reviewing games for the SNES and Sega Megadrive. On day, one of these magazines had a feature on some Japanese animated films and this was when my friends and I discovered the word “anime”. From that point on we scoured every games magazine we could and would buy any that had even the smallest article on anime.

Then one day, not long after, a friend came into school and said “You have to come to my house at dinner time, I have something you need to see!”. That weekend he had been shopping with his mum and found a brand new video called Project A-Ko, rated a 15 he’d had to get his mum to buy it for him. We rushed to his house as soon as the dinner bell rang and he put the video in, this was it, I was ready for my anime virginity to be taken, and what a wild ride it was! More exciting than the film itself though was the advert at the start for a whole host of other Japanese cartoons, each more action packed and violent than the last.

The door was now wide open for us, not only were we scouring magazines this stuff was now in our local video shops. Only a few titles, but it was enough to keep us going for a while. But then the itch came. Films we’d see advertised in imported American computer games magazines, films not available to us that we desperately wanted to see. Then we found out a lot of these films were actually based on comics. Or rather based on “manga”. So when the school holidays came it was time to get on the bus or train to the nearest city with a comic shop (Nu Earth in York) and scour the shelves for English translations imported from America.

Here we found Akira, a film we had still yet to see, reprinted in English in high quality collections. Project A-Ko comics. Something called The Guyver. And many other comics of which we had seen the anime versions advertised. One comic that caught my friends eye was one called Ninja High School. This one was different though. It LOOKED Japanese in style but was actually one of (if not THE) first American comics done in a manga style.

After all this time and effort we still hadn’t managed to see the one film that first started this obsession, Akira. No shops near us seemed to ever stock it, the local video shop never had it to rent. The Daily Mail had run a campaign to try and ban it, claiming it would corrupt children, obviously not being able to comprehend that there was a whole world of animation oversees that wasn’t aimed at children. I doubt this campaign had anything to do with the lack of Akira in or local shops though.

Then one day on a shopping trip to Scarborough with my mum I stumbled upon a brand new magazine in a newsagents: Manga Mania. This thick black and white magazine had news, reviews, interviews, articles, but best of all it reprinted Akira, amongst other manga.

Advertised in Manga Mania was a video called The Guyver, which I remembered seeing the comic of in Nu Earth. The plan with this video was different to anything we’d ever seen before though. Each episode, 12 in all, would be released separately once a month for a year, like a monthly video comic. A further shopping trip to Scarborough, and a Woolworths shop attendant who didn’t ask for ID, later and I was the proud owner of the first episode of The Guyver. And I was hooked.

A few months later Manga Mania announced the news that BBC2 would be showing Akira, along with a documentary on anime by Jonathan Ross. This was it, the day we had waited for since that art class. Christmas and New Year came and went and the BBC started advertising their showing of Akira. The video recorder was set and the next day I finally got to see what seemed to be the Holy Grail of anime. And it was worth the wait. (It was also great to find out that Ross was “one of us”, a bit of a geek. Later on in life I found out he’s actually a huge comic book collector and even once ran a comic shop of his own).

Through Manga Mania we discovered that we’d already been exposed to various forms of anime over the years, often in European co-productions like Dogtanian, Belle & Sebastian plus Pole Position, Ulysses 31, G-Force, Jayce And The Wheeled Warriors and the greatest of all: Mysterious Cities Of Gold.

We’d even managed to see a film called Laputa Castle In The Sky, which is famous now for being an early film of Hayao Miyazaki, but at the time we had no idea of the concept of anime.

It was exciting to slowly uncover new manga and anime, to track down shows and comics we’d seen in imported magazines which in turn we had to track down in the first place. It was exciting to save up pocket money and get on the bus or train and see what new amazing stories we could find on the shelves of York’s comic stores. Friends would find out about something and share it with each other in the playground. We’d swap comics and videos. We’d spend our dinner times in the school library drawing our own comics in a manga style.

I very much doubt that same excitement exists now, with the instant gratification given to us by the internet. There is no waiting for information on something, you just go online, search for it and there it is, everything you need to know. In many ways I miss those simpler times. Of course, growing up takes a lot of that to begin with, but for the most part I can still get excited about new things, it’s just the learning about them part that is over too quickly after a few taps on a keyboard into Google.

All these years later and I still haven’t seen a lot of the films I used to search for when I was at school, mainly because it turns out a lot of them were crap. It took a long time before a good wide range of decent anime was released to us here in the west. Back in those school days it was mainly just the shocking violent stuff that was seen as being different to our western eyes. Thankfully these days there is a great range of translated anime and manga and it’s made a huge impact on the western market.

The internet may have taken away most of the excitement, but the great thing about it is that it allows people to discover more things they wouldn’t have, and easily. It also allows us to buy things more easily (I’m currently reading Volume 3 of Akira, I managed to buy all 6 volumes off eBay for less than half the price that it would have cost me from a shop).

Kids’ road to discovering manga and anime is a lot easier now, there is a massive amount of product ready and waiting for them before they even have to search for anything. I wonder if, had the internet been around like it is when I was younger, would this “new craze” have fascinated me so much? In the end I guess it would, as I’m now living in a world of instant internet gratification and yet I still love discovering new manga and anime.