It must have been in the early to mid 90's, I saw a 'ranma 1/2' comic book published by Viz comics. It was #3 (1st serie) and I bought it b'cos I thought the cover was cute. I read the story and it made no sense (since I had not read #1 and #2) but I still liked the art so I eventually hunted down the rest of it and followed the serie for about a year. But eventually I grew bored with it, until I saw Matt Thorn's book (another one published by Viz 'four shoujo stories'). Online, which was different back then, mostly mailing lists run by Hitoshi Doi; Matt was one of the experts on Shoujo manga. Still, on the local scene there wasn't very much I was interested in, there wasn't much to begin with and nearly all of it was all popularized shounen or sometimes porn. Still, one day Robert DeLoura posted a translation of Hime-chan no Ribon manga to one of the mailing lists I was on (mid 90's). I got the original manga and read it, I started following Ribon (the magazine that Hime-chan was running in), then a little after that Nakayoshi (which ran things like Sailor Moon), and other similar things. As for anime, I wasn't that interested, until later when DVDs were beginning to catch on and websites like 'dvdexpress.com' started appearing. These sites were practically giving away DVDs, many ran free promotionals or deals like 'give us your e-mail address / sign up a friend / get a free DVD'. With e-mail sites like geocities out there, which offered free e-mail accounts (paid for with advertising) this basically became a limitless supply of free DVDs. After about a year those sites started to disappear, but by then I was interested enough to keep up with the local scene. Late 90's I was rather active in a club that made and showed fansubs, then in 2000 I was in an active digisub group (even though I didn't actually do anything), since then I've been really into it.