Before streaming, before forums, before you could watch anything you wanted at 2am, there was Animerica. Launched by Viz in 1992, it was one of the first US magazines devoted entirely to anime and manga.

What made it work was that Viz was a publisher rather than a magazine house. Animerica ran reviews, industry news, interviews and episode guides, and then it also serialized manga in its own pages, which almost nothing else in America was doing at the time. Chapters of Ranma 1/2, Video Girl Ai and Battle Angel Alita ran there monthly, which meant the magazine was simultaneously the trade press and the delivery mechanism. For a lot of readers it was the first place they encountered a manga page laid out properly at all.

It was also edited with real seriousness by people who knew the material, Trish Ledoux and Julie Davis among them, at a point when most mainstream coverage of anime in the US was either dismissive or worked entirely from the handful of titles that had made it to video. Animerica covered what was airing in Japan, named staff and studios, and treated directors as authors. That's ordinary now. It was not ordinary in 1993.

Viz spun off Animerica Extra later in the decade to carry the shojo serials that didn't fit, and the main magazine ran until 2005, by which point Shonen Jump's American edition had taken over the job of putting manga in front of people monthly.

Flipping through an issue now is a time capsule. The ads alone map the entire arc of anime crossing into the American mainstream: mail-order VHS at forty dollars a tape, then LaserDisc, then DVD, then nothing, because by then you had a broadband connection.

My collection starts at Vol. 1, No. 1, and reading them in order is like watching a subculture grow up month by month.