"You could've probably bought gold with all that..."

That was what my Mom said after seeing me re-arrange my magazines, comics and DVD collection.

The thing was, I decided to continue looking for my Naruto DVDs today and I came across my old Gempak collection from secondary school. It was piled up about 1 feet tall in the back of my old closet, I took it out (along with all the other stuff in there) but still, no sign of Naruto...I'm really beginning to think that the whole set of DVDs might've been stolen in that incident two years ago....

But thanks to this Naruto-searching thing, I finally took my time to re-arrange my magazines.

And this is what it looks like now,

I had the magazines and big books (like Harry Potter) stacked in the back and the comics and smaller books and DVDs at the front.

This is the treasure of my youth 

(^w^)

And this is the very first Gempak I ever bought (or seen to be honest). Gempak didn't come to my hometown till a couple of years after it was first published, so I was really thrilled when I first saw this one and bought it straight away!

And believe it or not, that was almost 10 years ago!

Gempak was still less than RM4.00 back then...

But this was legend for me.

This copy of Gempak started everything..

It was this copy that introduced me to Ghibli Studio's amazing artwork, Spirited Away (though I have to admit I didn't really understand what the magazine was saying when I first read this article - never seen a Japanese anime-movie before. At least never seen one that looked as amazing as the one featured in the article above)

And my encounter with Ghibli's and Miyazaki Hayao's works just kept coming from then on, as a result -

I'm a die-hard fan now! (I've seen almost all of Miyazaki's works!)

(^ e ^) \/

This copy was also the one that introduced me to the horror wonders of Ito Junji.

Ito Junji is famous for horror-manga-turned-movie The Ring as well as Uzumaki.

I love Ito Junji's works and have read a few translated ones myself, but I've never read both The Ring or Uzumaki before...ironic huh~

And along with the mountain of Gempaks are a puddle of other Art Square Group magazines namely Starz, Utopia, Hype. Though I do admit that Utopia and Hype are not really my type of reading material so I probably have less than 20 of both of them combined. The ones above are the very first editions of both Hype and Utopia featuring Avril Lavinge (Utopia) and Linkin Park (Hype) on the covers. 

The first edition of Starz was inside of the closet, if I'm not mistaken the cover featured Naruto...while the first edition of Popcorn is in Auckland....whose art was it again on Popcorn's first cover?..... was it Puppeteer's? I don't remember.....

Anyway, I'm gonna show this to my children, nieces and nephew(s) one day...with pride heeee~ 

(^ w ^)