I read an article in the LA Times on the Comic 
Con. A fairly large section of it was dedicated 
to cels and I thought it was kind of stupid to 
collect painted sheets of plastic. I collected 
anime tapes but I thought cels were too fragile 
and not worth the money.

A few months later, I was at a comic shop with my 
Mom. She saw a cel of Deedlit from Lodoss War for 
$100 and said "hey, look at this". I thought to 
myself, why would you pay a $100 for a piece of 
plastic, esp. since it took boxes of them to make 
the cartoon in the first place. Now, I think I 
was an idiot.

About a year after that, I found some Guyver 
cels, it probably isn't to the rest of the forum, 
but The Guyver is my favorite anime. I knew whole 
chunks of dialog from it. It pretty much made me 
into an anime nut. The cels were priced at $15 
and I thought, well, it’s a real part of the 
cartoon and it’s less than a tape (although that 
changed after shipping and handling).

Then I found some Teknoman/Tekkaman cels in Anime-
Cel.com’s bargain basement. After that came Ebay, 
Mandarake’s bins, and other people’s cel pages.