I've first known about Mahou Sensei Negima in 2005 when the first anime series was still airing. I've watched a few episodes and I thought they were quite bad so I decided to drop it. A few years later, between 2007 and 2008, I've stumbled across the Negima manga series but I decided to ignore it because after seeing its anime counterpart, I thought everything Negima-related was bad. I kept seeing links to a manga chapter everywhere in the internet (I am a anime/manga fan and Negima is one of the biggest manga titles of the late 2000's) but I still kept ignoring them although I did look-up some characters in Wikipedia. Back then, I saw the protagonist named Negi Springfield as a Harry Potter-style wizard and that the vampire character named Evangeline was the main antagonist but I was so wrong about that just like my view of the Negima series at the time.
Sometime during 2010, I met a hardcore Negima fan in the internet. He was so obsessed with it and wanted to share it with me and showed me some scans from the manga but still, I had little interest about the series back then. A year later, I finally started showing interest in the series after researching more information about the story namely about Chao Lingshen and her time-travelling and I found the Natsumi-Kotaro pairing to be pretty cute. I started reading the manga sometime during late 2011 and found them to be pretty good with a top-notch art and a funny story and decided to buy all the available English-translated volumes by Del Ray-Kodansha around Christmas time. It quickly became my favourite manga series.
