by Chuck Gaffney

Created on: September 26, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

In order for me to talk about my life as an anime fan I must first mention where I came from. I started very very young as a video game fan. At the age of 1 you could have caught me playing Pac Man Jr. on my dad's Atari 2600. From then on I was a fan of video games and indirectly a fan of Japanese culture. I would watch the old pre-Nick-Toon cartoons of the 80's and I was in my little childhood heaven.

Fast forward to late 1996; I'm a young 7th grader, still a big video game fan and now just getting into the internet age. My life consisted of mainly Nintendo driven games and yes that year Pokemon came out in America but it didn't register as "anime" in my mind since I never recognized anime as I do now. To me they were just Japanese cartoons and since Pokemon lacked the artistict mastery of other titles, I couldn't set apart the difference between American cartoons and the far superior Japanese Anime cartoons. I did watch the show religiously but that was mainly because I was a fan of the game. America itself didn't really identify anime outside of a common cartoon then but that would soon change.

Turn the clock ahead a bit to mid and late 1997 and I soon began to step into more than just Nintendo games. I was brought to the attention of the Sony Playstation game, Final Fantasy VII. I didn't bother with the game at first since it wasn't in the Nintendo line-up but thanks to a good friend of mine, he let me see what the commotion was about. The deep story line and the multi-leveled characters that grow to become a part of you never to this day left my mind. This type of character development still to this day lacks not just in western cartoons but in western story telling as a whole. So in turn, I couldn't get the characters off my mind so I turned to the internet for their pictures and info. This lead me to discover that artwork made in Japan just seemed... well, better. There was life in the photos and actual effort put into every line. From then on I realized what anime was and was hooked. Also, the anime series Dragon Ball Z came on TV in America for the first time helping me realize there was a whole world of much better drawn cartoons out there that weren't all sugary and sweet with Christian overtones.

Go ahead a few more years to 2002, my high school graduation year. In the cafeteria you would have caught me drawing, in an attempt to draw with the same artistic quality they do in japan. The thing I found was that it is very hard to make your work look

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