I started reading manga when i got bored of anime and wanted to find something new or more detailed. I started reading it when i finished waching latest anime episodes. That's the good way to get forth on some animes.

I used to HATE manga for some really curious reason, then I had ntohing to read and picked up and manga and thought that it was pretty good =)

I picked it up when I first got into manga/anime and my friend convinced me to watch Inuyasha...I got impatient with the anime and decided to just read it instead because I could go through the series faster XD

mm long story XD i was allways attracted to the art style from been little without havin any idea about what it was or where it was from, i allways watched the kids anime when i was little cause i just loved the style, as i got older i grew out of the kids anime mostly, but that didnt change the fact id allways been a rabid gamer from been like 4, and that obssesion simply continued. During the lead up to the release of legend of zelda twilight princess, i found a girl on the net who also loved zelda and anime and manga, and she recomended some anime to me and i found a new love for it again, and understood it wasnt just for children at all, i finally got around to readin manga about half a year later after i finished watching the fruits basket anime to be greeted with a crappy ending

Hm, I think I started reading manga after I finished watching Tokyo Mew Mew (don't laugh). I wanted to see the manga counterpart, and naturally I liked it better. Then I started reading more and more series until I found FMA, and it will eternally be my favorite

I started reading manga because there is anime on TV ever since I have access to a TV (read: age 1). 8D
Parents back then usually buy us manga such as Doraemon, which is quite educational, and then we start to expand our manga interest to other genres.

I got into reading Manga from Dragonball (Z, specifically). I knew there was a comic (didn't know what the word "Manga" was, I was seven. XD) so I went to the book store and bought volume 1 of the DBZ arc of Dragonball. After that, I bought a Shonen Jump one day and just took off. Oh, and then I found OneManga. XD

I started reading manga because of the anime Death Note, I'd seen the anime and my friend had read the manga and she told me it was good so I went on the internet and looked it up and after one chapter I couldn't stop reading manga, and it also made me want to watch more anime.

If I'm not mistaken, the first manga I read before was 'Cherry Juice' and its story made me hunger for more stories ... and that's how it all started....

It was all through a few friends of mine.
They introduced some manga books to me, and that's how I began to like them.

Manga is a great book portraying lives . . .
Sounds quite shallow but twas true .. ..
Besides my friend pushed it to my face before I liked it .. . .

@ Miyokochan : I envy you ! >.< .. atleast you're surrounded with anime stuffs while me ... nah .. I can't even go out in Manila to buy some anime stuff !




Generally, I pick up manga to ease my boredom but the main purpose of it is to learn new things and look up to mangaka who were often great in their art works !

I got into it when I was fourteen years old, near the end of freshman year of high school. I had always loved animation, and I watched cartoons so much when I was a kid. However, I found myself getting a bit tired of American cartoons (especially since at that point a lot of the good ones were getting canceled/going off air and lots of crap came about on CN, Nick, etc.).

When my friends introduced me to manga, it was an entirely new medium than what I had seen before. The art was gorgeous and much more realistic than most American cartoons (excluding things like Batman & the comic genre) and the stories were so much more mature and substantial. Also, in a lot of cartoons, characters are very black and white. Good or bad, sweet or nasty, brave or cowardly, funny or dull, etc. Manga had such fleshed out characters with endless depth. Like real humans, they usually can't be placed in just one category. By the time I had been introduced to manga, I had been at the age and point in my life when I wanted something more serious and of thicker material than the cartoons and anime like Hamtaro and Pokemon being shown on TV.

So, to make it short, manga combines wonderful art and visuals with fantastic stories. They are truly deserving of the title "graphic novel."

I liked anime way back before I knew it was anime (my favorite childhood movie was Kiki's Delivery Service back when I was about 6 or 7), and then in 3rd grade I saw Spirited Away and fell in love with it too. What got me into manga though happened later, in about 4th grade, because my best friend's brothers were really into it and so their house was like a manga library. She introduced me to Rurouni Kenshin and the Nausicaa manga, and I've been an otaku ever since

FMA was the first anime/manga to turn me into a crazed fangirl, though XD

When I was young, I started watching anime first, but then when I noticed that there was manga, I was instantly hooked because lot of the series that I loved were just so much more detailed in manga. Nowadays I read manga when I have no school work and I'm not out with friends. It's a good "alone time" activity I guess?

I became interested in Manga because... hmm.... I had been watching HEAPS of anime, with FMA being the favourite, and I suddenly wondered, 'what would the books form of these anime's be like?'

So I started with Vampire knight, which was pretty good Then FMA

i picked up manga only to know the other story of fma...(the manga storyline)

EDITED BECAUSE NOW THE STORY IS BETTER EXPLAINED
It was 2nd grade and there was this manga my friend was reading. Amazing Agent Luna. I didn't even know what manga was back then, only anime. And the only anime I enjoyed was Pokemon so...
Years later in 5th grade I met my best friend over the word "Inuyasha" and after weeks of talking about anime I asked if she thought there were books for our favorite anime and she said "yes". She then explained the concept of manga.
2 weeks later I stepped into Barnes and Noble and I found something that look so familiar... Whats this...? Amazing Agent luna is a manga! I bought it and read it. there's my wodnerrful story. x3 You should know the end.

I wanted to see what was different about the Sailor Moon manga compared to the anime. ^^

and...

I thought it looked pretty.

I think I was about 15-almost 16 yrs old when a couple friends (who were both big anime/manga fans) and myself took a trip to the bookstore. At the time, I absolutely detested anything related to anime and manga, a ridiculous hatred that started after realizing that Haruka and Michiru (Amara and Michelle) from Sailor Moon were lesbians (and, of course, I was extremely anti-gay/homo) and that Cardcaptor Sakura (Cardcaptors) was really about not just the cards but love in all forms and relationships :/ Yeah. I was pretty...hardcore.

Well, I was bored at the bookstore and followed my friends to the manga section. I saw 'Fullmetal Alchemist' and decided to flip through it; it looked interesting :3 I couldn't buy it, so once we left, we headed to the library and I checked out vol. 1. Got myself immediately hooked!

Guess you could say FMA saved me from my anime/manga hate Heh. Now I'm one of those overly-obsessed fangirls *shot*

I picked up manga only because my one friend got me into it. xD

I think I was 12.

I had been watching Detective Conan on Adult Swim, and my sister had been watching it with me, as well as Naruto on cartoon network. We went to Barnes and Noble, and she wanted to buy the magna for Naruto. However, it was then that she saw they had a manga series for Detective Conan, so she decided to buy that instead.

Because she bought it, I got interested and read it too xD And it all just sort of went from there.

Oh, well that's actually a pretty good one...

My two best friends were SUPER into it last year and I had never read it or watched it. So every time we'd hang out (which wasn't a lot 'cause I was off at college and they were still in high school) we'd do something FMA related. It was actually kind of annoying after a while because I wasn't into it, and yet I was kind of forced into doing stuff related to it. But I powered through it 'cause I love them to pieces

Of course, after about a year of living like this, I thought "Jeez, there's got to be some reason why they're so into this series. If they like it this much, it has to be good, right?" So while I was hanging around in the city between classes, I went to a bookstore and picked up a few volumes. Ever since then, I've been HOOKED.

Looking back, I can't believe I didn't pick it up sooner. Now FMA is my favorite manga and I enjoy having FMA spasms alongside my friends xD

At first I didn't know anime was based on manga. I liked anime, and it wasn't until I started watching One Piece that I found out there was an actual MANGA. *Fail* So I started reading it and I loved it. I still didn't know at this point that I could buy them in this country.

But one day my friend came into the library at college and emptied her bag which was full of her Fruits Basket manga collection, and I looked at them with awe; I'd never seen a "back-to-front" book before and the art inside looked crisp and clear. Then a few weeks later, I started to get into the D. Gray-Man anime, and my other friend told me he collected D.Gray-Man manga, and I asked him how much it was to buy. So then I started collecting manga. D.Gray-man was my first manga collection...aaaaah memories.

(As you can tell, I got into the whole thing pretty late! )

Well, a lot like Pierrot, I thought there was only anime. =v=; And when I learned about manga, I was generally unimpressed; black and white illustrations, nothing really special.

Then I went to Borders, and bought my very first 'manga', purely out of curiousity (iirc, it was from a Korean company).

I got hooked. The art was awesome, the story was fun; I started to take up drawing at around that time again. I regret nothing!

I'd gotten a gift card for Books-A-Million for my birthday, but the store only had one of the books I wanted. I was not happy. Not wanting to leave with just one book (I can't do that at a bookstore), I started browsing all the different book sections. I'd heard about manga, I was getting tired of the usual genres I read, and I wanted something new and different, so I drifted by the manga section and was surprised by the amount they had. I gravitated towards Fullmetal Alchemist because it drew my interest; it wasn't all bubbly like half the others, and it actually looked pretty cool. Plus, I'd already received a recommendation or two and heard that it was good. Now, I rarely buy books without reading them first, so I was a bit hesitant, but I decided I might as well go for it and bought the first volume. When I got home, I figured out how to read it, and my reaction was somewhere along the lines of, "8D8D8D NO ONE TOLD ME THEY WERE THIS GOOD!" I became a greedy manga reader after that.

And it led to my subsequent enjoyment of anime.

Best impulse buy EVER. (I still have the receipt, too.) Practically changed the way I enjoyed life; I don't know, something about getting into manga/anime gave me a lot more confidence in myself. I'm now a very happy and content nerd.

Back when I was 11, I was right into anime. I watched a bunch of anime that came on TV (Pokemon, Digimon, "Cardcaptors", and Gundam Wing.), and one of my friends had a volume of Inuyasha. She referred to it as an "anime book" and as I was right into anime and was also a major bookworm, so the idea seemed so awesome.
On top of that, I did enjoy reading comics, so it was right up my alley.

So the first manga I read was Inuyasha, and from there I started reading tons. At the time it was pretty hard to find new ones as they weren't sold in stores, and I was too young to have a job anyway. Libraries didn't carry them, and at that time websites like Mangafox didn't exist.
So I would ask for some that sounded interesting for birthdays and Christmas for my mom to buy me off of Amazon.ca xD
I also found some via scanlations. At that point the amount of scanlations available were quite limited and pretty much "underground." xD First scanlation I ever read was DNAngel.

Nowadays, it's so EASY to find manga. There's shelves of them in bookstores, there are many at libraries that you can borrow, and now there's manga reading sites and tons of scanlator groups.

By now I've moved on to reading manga in Japanese, but thankfully those are quite easy to find nowadays too. There's a store I bus out to (Book-Off) and they have shelves of Japanese manga.

It seems funny now. Back in the day it was so hard to find English manga, and now I have stacks of Japanese ones. xD

(I'm 21 by the way to put this post in better perspective of how long ago)