One favorite TV show came on Saturdays at 6am and I was up early to catch the Batman TV series with Adam West and Burt Ward. I prefer the fun and camp of Batman '66 to the later gloom and doom Dark Knight and Christopher Nolan movies. After Batman was Ultraman about Hayata, a member of the Science Patrol, who is given a magical Beta Capsule by a mysterious alien, that transforms him into Ultraman. This started my kaiju love affair that is still going on strong today.
My life changed during the Summer of '77 when I was four years old watching Star Wars at a small movie theater on Hillsborough Ave. I was obsessed with collecting Star Wars toys and comics. So, TV shows and movies greatly influenced me with comic buying. In the 70's I was reading Star Wars, any comic about sharks, thanks to Jaws, Rom the Space Knight, and I loved the Micronauts. Of course, some of the coolest toys in the 70s were the Shogun Warriors with the flying fists so I had the comics also.
Then in 1978 the Superman movie came out and I loved it. That started a Superman comics buying craze. Also that year I started watching Battle of the Planets about a team with five members who must work together to save the earth from the evil Zoltar. Gold Key put out the comics and I had to have them.
I was raised on a unique blend of Western comics and Japanese comics that at that time and still under 10, I didn't know those comics were Japanese or care. So when did the transition to manga begin?
That happened in '87, I was placed in Advanced Art at Monroe Middle School in South Tampa, and a friend of mine from elementary school, John Holland, was also into comics and we were in the same art class. We used to go the Book Worm, a tiny comics and used bookstore on Manhattan, just past the McDonald's on Gandy Blvd. John got me interested in being a serious collector and introduced me to Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, back before the silly cartoon, the turtles were dangerous and had a niche cult following. We were interested in the Ninja Turtles because the first issue was already commanding a high price on the market. So we were looking for anything that would be the next hit like Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters and Geriatric Gangrene Jujitsu Gerbils. This started me on the path towards indie books and away from Marvel and DC.
However what really grabbed me was eating lunch at Monroe in the cafeteria. I was with Ed Jenkins and we were talking comics. Ed was talking about a cool book he was reading that was filled with crazy action and like nothing I had ever read before. I took interest and went to my local comics shop to get it. That was Ben Dunn's Ninja High School. This manga/anime inspired comic hooked me in and wouldn't let go. I had grown up with Sho Kosugi ninja movies on HBO and Storm Shadow from G. I. Joe but wasn't prepared for the impact that Ninja High School would have.
There was the all to common high school setting, that was actually new and fresh in 1987, with cute girls who could actually fight, sometimes in bikinis, with great artwork and a good story.
Also in '87, John and I were shopping at Goodwill, we loved browsing thrift stores on the Weekends, and found a gorgeous comic with killer cover art by Frank Miller that was deep in Japanese history called Lone Wolf and Cub. Here is the issue I bought for only 15 cents.
At that time Robotech was broadcast on TV and my friends and I were big fans. We used to go to Merlin's Comics that used to be in South Tampa near the Publix on Dale Mabry and Neptune. It was here that I first discovered Eternity's Robotech comic.
A few years later I was in college at the University of South Florida and had Japanese roommates. I was taking Japanese 4 and my Japanese friends would give me their manga magazines after they finished. This helped my Japanese reading level immensely. The manga mags had Samurai stories that reminded me of Lone Wolf and Cub.
In 1999 I was accepted in USF's Study Aboard program, which meant I would be studying Japanese at Kansai Gaidai University in Hirakata City, near Osaka, in Japan. One of my friends, Midori, who was a 19-year old girl back in 1999, gave me my first Japanese manga in tankoubon, (paperback book form,) and that was Detective Conan. Known in the US as Case Closed, this was the manga I took with me for the long plane ride to Japan. Stayed tune for more manga adventures. The seeds were already planted throughout my life and then I was in Japan seeking out manga.
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