Let's see... when did I start collecting cels?  I 
think it was the summer of 2000 maybe earlier.  
So that's almost 3 years ago.  God, scary.  I was 
on an Escaflowne kick, and I was totally bummed 
by the end of the series, so I was looking for 
doujinshi and other anime products to try and 
curb the bummed feeling.  Silly in retrospect, I 
guess.  But anyway, I'd been on ebay for about 6 
months at that point, mostly buying X-Men comics 
to get caught up (I quit reading them like 
freshman year of high school... so that 
was '94... man, so long ago).  And I noticed on 
the anime pages that I was searching that people 
were selling Escaflowne cels.  So I was 
like, "What are cels?"  

So, like any good hobbyist-to-be, I did a lot of 
searching on the net to find out what the whole 
deal was about.  And I was kind of fascinated by 
it.  So I bought this tiny cheap cel from Brain 
Powerd on ebay, like in June or July.  When it 
came, I wasn't sure what to think.  It was cool, 
the sketch rocked, but it was kind of small.  So 
I decided to go for something bigger to see if I 
still liked the idea of owning these things.  And 
that's when I discovered animanga.org and the 
keep-track page.  The first cel I bought that I 
really loved was from Yann, actually.  It's my 
only single Hitomi cel, and I still adore it.  
I've had it for 3 years already... man, amazing 
considering how often I weed out my collections 
as interests change and money disappears.  Heh, 
to think that I had a Van dragon armor cel which 
I sold when my interest moved to other series, 
but I couldn't bring myself to part with Hitomi.  
It's such a quiet, peaceful cel of her.  That 
doesn't happen too much in the series, does it?  
^_^  

Kaerra