Stress relief and reading manga

Main Entry: man·ga
Pronunciation: \ˈmäŋ-gə\
Function: noun
Etymology: Japanese, comic, cartoon, from man- involuntary, aimless + -ga picture
Date: circa 1951
: a Japanese comic book or graphic novel

When I first read my first manga I was 16 years old and was doing my ordinary level exams with my parents breathing down my back. I started reading it after I how popular it was. Many people have heard of 'Naruto', whether the manga version of it or it's anime version (animation of it) or both of it. In almost every manga or anime website Naruto will on the top of it and I wanted to know what was so big about it. And instantly I was hooked on it.

I guess looking back now I was probably looking for something to occupy my mind other than the huge amount of studies cramped in my mind and my mother who kept nagging at me to study,study and study.

I stayed up almost every night reading the manga and watching the anime of it and within two weeks I had read some 200 chapters of manga and watched one hundred something episodes of it.

And after I finished with Naruto I kept watching other anime and manga, and even today I keep looking for some new manga that will catch my interest because I've read almost every one of them out there. There are some really good ones. Creepy ghost stories like 'Ghost Hunt' or mind boggling stories like 'Death Note' that will keep the reader guessing whether the protagonist will get caught or not.

Reading always kept my mind off things, I had an obsession of reading books since I was younger and now it's focused towards manga. And also after reading them I found an interest in drawing too. There's so much to see in the manga, the techniques, story, drawing technique, the interactions of characters and in some of them, the blasting end of the story.

And now I can understand basic Japanese!!! If I get stranded in Japan by some very weird and impossible accident at least I know how to say that I'm lost. But I probably won't need it since they understand English now. damn..