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Unfortunately my interest in my favorite anime and manga has been slipping a little bit and the only reason for that is actually not the same reason as most of you might have. I am STILL holding myself back from reading the last 3 books because I WANT to read them in 日本語. It's taking a lot longer to learn than I thought (and I screwed up a bit so I had to restart). It's been many months since I started and left off on volume 29. I was thinking I'd like to reread Guyver to re-motivate myself and I was wondering... how did you guys do it? Did you start from the beginning of the manga, or did you watch the 2005 series and started from there? Did you just say screw it and started from when gigantic appears because the story is so familiar to you now? The very first time I started reading the manga, I started from the end of the 2005 series. I have since read it from the beginning though. However I found the 2005 series was actually a pretty smooth transition even though there are a lot of differences from the manga. I've tried to do that with the OVA but there are so many contradictions. Although.... and this is something I can't do with the 2005 series, I actually like imagining that the voices of the characters in the manga sound just like the Japanese voice actors in The OVA. I know not everybody does this but I need to read words while hearing them being spoken in my head. It just helps the story flow better for me. So for this reason I like to watch the OVA before reading the manga, at pretty much any point of the story. I know a lot of you are fans of the English dub and maybe you do the same with the English voice actors for the manga. - How did you read the Manga the first time? - If you ever re-read it, how did you start over? - Lastly, do you plan on reading it again soon or are you taking a break from the story because you know it so well?

My older brother rented the first series of the guyver from the local blockbuster videos store around 1998. I didn't even think about the manga until about 8 years ago, despite my twin brother finding a single viz comic at the local comic shop in 2000. They only ever had one issue in, so I thought it was unobtainable to me. I got on to anime a lot more in about 2010, then drifted in to manga and stumbled across japanlegend after reading up to chapter 28. I tend to binge read it once a year, from start to finish, whenever the mood strikes.

My story is pretty mundane. I had gone though a few years without giving guyver much thought until I dug up my old VHS tapes and started watching it again. I did this in part to get back into Guyver but also to try and hunt down other older anime from there advertisements. That was how I got into the works of Go Nagai, a trailer for Devilman was actually on the first one I owned, OVA 3, along with another series I would become interested in Mermaid Saga. This revitalised intreast is what lead my to start buying the manga of Guyver from amazon and ebay. Naturally I eventually his the road block that all wester guyver fans come to, the manga was cancelled. Thus I started searching online which lead me to not only guyver but other manga I had desperately wanted to read. I would not make my way to the site proper until the JL staff realised someone was leaking the manga to streaming sites, a fact I had been totally ignorant of. I made my way here and the rest is history. And thats also when my inability to stick with a name also began. I've recently read the manga so I'm not likely to go thought it again for a while, I've got to catch up on a few others like Mazinger Zero and Demon Lord Dante while working on my own manga project. Thats really cool, I've gone though a similar situation when I wanted to read the Blue Hole manga I'm currentlt translating.

I first came to guyver in 1992 when manga wasn't readily available to the west. Even the VIZ comics were not readily available to me in the uk. I spent so much time and money visiting various comic shops trying to locate what imports I could. There wasn't any internet then so the means to get things like that was very very limited. I read guyver manga in piecemeal, and only up to a point. Viz only went so far so past that point, guyver was impossible to get until around 1995/96. at that point, it was possible to get the japanese manga but then it was impossible to read. Round that time, japanese language learning tools were not as wide and varied as they are now. there were a few books in my local library but they weren't that useful. learning grammar, and context etc was unrealistic. there were some rough translations available on the webs, but there were a lot of errors in them and they were sparse, only giving light summaries and missing great swathes of the story. I tried to translate bits and pieces with my dictionaries and helped the old warriorguyver site with various details, but it was slow and it was tough, without understanding context and how to read the nuances of kanji. Then I discovered that the italians had translated guyver and were keeping quite up to date with it. I didn't know italian but it seemed a lot easier to translate italian through a machine translator. for one, it would be a lot easier to type the words in, than the japanese characters. so we started translating the italian books. over time, my japanese skills got better and I would go to the japanese books to help get more accuracy. then we had durendal come aboard and help translating from chinese and japanese. essentially, I have read the guyver manga way too many times, in small fragmented snippets and in all sorts of different languages. I am not sure if I have ever actually read it in order from beginning to 'end'.