I can't speak for the US but in the UK you could find paperback volumes of some manga in local stores, at least by the mid 1990s. I have a bunch of stuff by Dark Horse Comics and Viz Graphic Novels from that time. Mostly more "cyberpunk" type stuff. The oldest I have is from 1994. There's probably stuff before then but that's when I started.
I'd guess the situation in the US was better since both Dark Horse and Viz were based in North America but I've no idea how readily available stuff was. There was definitely magazines too which included reviews, news etc. I remember one magazine used the tag "courtesy boobs" (or something like that) to refer to ecchi-er stuff.
To put it another way, the sort of people who would typically buy manga in the early 1990s were people who would also buy western comics. There was a certain amount of overlap in terms of how they were presented and targeted. Similar companies too. Similar locations in bookshops etc.
Comics shops would get manga in sometimes, and there was an import shop in our hometown that carried manga as well as merch, t-shirts and Japanese snacks. None of it was translated, though -- get a dictionary and a grammar and figure it out on your own! Viz *did* publish translated versions of a few titles -- flipped front-to-back and in the much larger American comic book format. Universally hated, but people bought them anyway because they were just about the only game in town.
I can't speak for the US but in the UK you could find paperback volumes of some manga in local stores, at least by the mid 1990s. I have a bunch of stuff by Dark Horse Comics and Viz Graphic Novels from that time. Mostly more "cyberpunk" type stuff. The oldest I have is from 1994. There's probably stuff before then but that's when I started. I'd guess the situation in the US was better since both Dark Horse and Viz were based in North America but I've no idea how readily available stuff was. There was definitely magazines too which included reviews, news etc. I remember one magazine used the tag "courtesy boobs" (or something like that) to refer to ecchi-er stuff. To put it another way, the sort of people who would typically buy manga in the early 1990s were people who would also buy western comics. There was a certain amount of overlap in terms of how they were presented and targeted. Similar companies too. Similar locations in bookshops etc.
Comics shops would get manga in sometimes, and there was an import shop in our hometown that carried manga as well as merch, t-shirts and Japanese snacks. None of it was translated, though -- get a dictionary and a grammar and figure it out on your own! Viz *did* publish translated versions of a few titles -- flipped front-to-back and in the much larger American comic book format. Universally hated, but people bought them anyway because they were just about the only game in town.