My first experience with anime was the old Voltron cartoons on USA Network when I was a kid, though I didn’t know it was anime then. Then, in high school, I stumbled across Sailor Moon on UPN and stayed on the channel to watch one of the best episodes of the series. I was hooked. When I got online later that year, I hunted down many newsgroups, web sites and mailing lists dedicated to SM. (Yes, I was a Moonie.) This was my introduction to the worlds of fanfiction and AMVs. There, I learned that there were a lot of other series in this strange genre called “anime.”
A year or so later, my younger brother managed to borrow a copy of Akira (the old Streamline dub) from one of his friends, followed by Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece Nausicaä, which was the first subtitled anime I saw and committed me to the genre completely.
I arrived at college having only seen these series and movies and joined the anime club on campus. Because the club’s entire board had graduated the previous year, I volunteered to be the Director of Public Relations (in charge of the website and mailing list) when the sole remaining officer called for freshman volunteers. I ended up holding that position for all four of my years at JHU.
Also that year, in addition to being introduced to many, many series and movies that I continue to love, the club attended Katsucon 6, which was my first anime convention. There, I first encountered the creators called CLAMP. I saw the first eight episodes of Magic Knight Rayearth, and have been a CLAMP fanboy ever since.
I first started making AMVs after Katsucon 7, and started submitting them to conventions at Nekocon FLASH.