Now on to animation part 2 : The invasion of anime.

The year was around 1996 to 1997.
All was peaceful and boring in America for kids. Nobody would expect
the phenomenon that would soon hit our shores. I was one of the lucky
youngsters who grew up during this time.

For me it all started one day before school. UPN ( A channel at the time ) which ran cartoons in the early mornings aired one that was quit peculiar....



I didn't know what it was, I didn't know why it looked so much different from any other cartoons I ever watched. All I knew was that I was hooked.

Now before you go " wtf mate that's a girl show. " Why did you like that shit?
First off,out of my friends it wasn't just me who watched this show .
At that time none of my friends or I ever saw a cartoon like that before. Cartoons in the US were little funnies that dealt with nothing more than humor and light story lines. This was something totally different. As you saw in the opening it had action out the kazooo, the story line keep going from episode to episode , the villains didn't look all goofy in fact some of them were down right scary. This was the first taste of more mature animation. Now we were all awed by this show...but still it was for girls. So as much as we liked it we boys couldn't really connect. And me and my friends couldn't express our like for the show in public because in the end it was a girl's show!

That is when this show came along...




The show us adrenalin junkie boys were waiting for. Now the craze for Anime started to boom. They had the girl market and now they just appealed to the boys. All that was left was the video game community which could appeal to both girls and boys and the marketing geniuses over in Japan just had the right answer. This is what made Anime known in the US and really started the mega craze.



That was it. We were invaded. For the next 5-6 years Anime would be at max popularity in America. You couldn't go anywhere without being able to hear about it or see it. Someone who thinks that Anime is big now really doesn't know. Compared to back then the Anime market now is a waste land.

This little era would greatly influence me during those couple of years in intermediate school.

But now back to how I overall decided I wanted to be a cartoonist / director.
So at this time I liked to draw. I drew very seldom though. Mostly Godzilla, video game characters and spider-man and or Ninja turtles.
( I was a huge Godzilla fan and ironically something else from Japan I was hooked
on )

But now I would start drawing the characters from Pokemon and Dragonball Z ALL THE TIME.




I would draw and draw for hours. Not any reason behind it just for fun like most kids do.


Most often during school when I was bored lol.


The Anime craze is what really started my own drawing craze. But at this point I still didn't know what a cartoonist was or even think about doing it for a profession.

I had yet to discover the main reason for me going in this direction.