From Books to Anime to Manga (and let's skip the cartoons and comics)
Reading has been the greatest way to spend my leisure time since a very young age. Coming from a family that places the utmost importance to education, there was never a time where I wasn’t aware of the importance of reading. And like most children, the introduction to reading comes in the form of comics.
My opinion of comics hasn’t changed much since I came across it: mundane and a complete waste of my time. Comics are preferred because of the pictures associated with them which are thought to help children learn faster. But the comics I came across had just terrible artwork and I would much rather read the words themselves, than waste time looking at those pictures. Hence, I broke up with my forced-upon companion, and went away with books; although I continued reading the comic strips on newspapers (I still do that whenever I can find a physical newspaper).
The above opinions are purely personal and have nothing against the people who genuinely enjoy them. There are a lot of individuals who absolutely adore comics and cartoons and these forms of entertainment have played a major role in their formative years, and are have kept up with those passions well into adulthood. It’s beautiful that they have found a way to express themselves through this passion just like I have through mine.
The transition was pretty smooth because my grandmother doesn’t believe in throwing away any sort of books (including notebooks from her children’s school days), and there was a huge selection for me. Most children’s books will most definitely have a pictorial representation of some kind even if it’s a condensed version of The Tempest. But these ones had an invariably better purpose, one of which is to aid the imaginative and descriptive capabilities of a young mind.
I simply adored those scant illustrations. And if there was any border art present, that was an absolute delight.
There was also a period of my life (seven to eight years, thereabout), where I became a potato. My potato years comprised of me doing all of my school work properly and spending my leisure time in front of the TV. We had to throw away a couch because I had created a crater on one edge of it from constantly sitting in that small position for hours. There might be questions regarding my parents and why they didn’t prevent the formation of that crater, and I present to you the valid arguments of them working full-time jobs, along with me staying on top of my school curriculum. Of course, there were threats and complains about me eventually burning my eyes out but to a ten-year-old, that kind of threat has absolutely no leverage.
By the time the crater was showing noticeable signs of depression, Anime came on TV. That brought a screeching halt to the presence of cartoons in my life and right now, I won’t even spend ten minutes subjecting my brain to it (unless it is a rerun of Tom and Jerry because let us be real, that one never stops being entertaining, for whatever reason).
The first aspect of anime that attracted me was obviously the artwork, then the plotline and finally the OST. With such critical hits, suffice to say, I was gone, hook, line and sinker.
What I learned sometime later, much aided by the presence of the internet finally having a presence in our home, was that anime was a product of manga. It might not always be the case, but it is for the most part. I also learned that animes are oftentimes far behind on the manga.
Do you know what this means?
I can get through the rest of the story without having to wait for an entire twenty-four hours just for a tiny thirty-minute episode.
Could you really blame me for gorging myself on mangas, then?
The regular opponents to my pigging out, my parents, were faced by the same argument they had received during my potato life: I was still doing well in school and they still had full-time jobs. I was definitely guilt-tripped into cutting down (thankfully not cold-turkey) a few months before my exams would start.
Needless to say, I’ve come a long way since that time and I try to read one manga series a year (it is not an easy task owing to the fact that they literally span over years, and if they become popular then the wait for the end is even longer).
I have come across some amazing characters and gotten the opportunity to immerse myself in a culture that I was ignorant of before. It has been simply breath-taking.
With the advent of the internet, getting access to them has also become a breeze and mostly free. Now the hurdle is only to clear up some calendar space and set time out to read/watch them.
I also dearly hope that the series I’m following would end already so that I can go back to chapter one and relive it in its entirety.
That also presents the problem of having to find another series to fill the gaping hole that will be left later, but that’s a bridge that will be crossed when I get there (that shouldn’t be very difficult see as my To-Read list keeps increasing exponentially every month)
Photo by Bagus Pangestu from Pexels
