With East Asian popular culture storming the globe, isn't it about time you got more acquainted?

NEO magazine started late 2004, in the U.K., and promotes manga, anime, Asian films, games, music and pop culture.

Here's an interview I conducted with it's editor, Stu Taylor.

Rawle Austin: How did you get into Asian pop culture?

Stu Taylor: Almost 20 years ago when a Chinese school friend lent me his collection of Akira comic books.

He also used to regularly bring back a kit robot magazine and various manga titles from his family trips to Hong Kong.

Basically, Uncooked was approached by one of its distributors who suggested that it consider publishing a UK manga/anime magazine.

There was a gap in the market as it had been years since there was a UK magazine that catered for this audience.

The tough part was selling the product to retailers who either had absolutely no idea what manga or anime was, or had completely the wrong perception (the idea that anime was "Japanese cartoon porn" being the most commonly held belief).

It took a lot of persuasion, money and time to convince retailers to take the magazine but once they did, NEO consistently performed on a month-by-month basis.

RA: What is the current state of the U.K. Asian pop culture market, in all it's guises?

The likes of Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle opening in national cinemas up and down the country shows how much more receptive the general public are now to 'foreign' subtitle movies.

It probably also helps that Hollywood is pilfering ideas from the cream of Asian cinema, with its own versions of A Tale of Two Sisters, Old Boy and Phone all on the drawing board.

Astute film buffs tend to pick up the original Asian versions of these in a kind of "I was there first" attitude (and also discovering that the Hollywood remakes tend to fall flat when held up in comparison with their source material).

RA: Which manga are you reading at the moment and what do you recommend to newcomers?

ST: Ironically, writing about Asian pop culture every day leaves me very little time to read anything!

However, the last manga book I read was Pet Shop of Horrors which is a series of stand-alone tales linked by a titular pet shop of weird and wonderful oddities.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the recent re-issue of Masamune Shirow's seminal Ghost in the Shell manga novel - some of the topics have become even more relevant in today's political climate than they were 20 odd years ago.

RA: What is your favourite anime and why?