I finally stopped getting ShojoBeat a couple months ago, and picked up the back-issue graphic novel collections of Nana when I noticed that the 'Swap had them on the shelf this week past. I had only really been reading Nana, Crimson Hero, and Absolute Boyfriend in the monthly magazine, and the latter two only because they were *in* the magazine - nearly seven bucks to read a single chapter of Nana felt like a waste of money, and I needed to justify the expense *somehow*.

The magazine was an interesting experiment for a while, but the problem was that they are running the same six manga they started with, and I'm bored with half of them, and not particularly enthusiastic about two of the other three. It might have worked better as a "first one or two or three chapters of each new manga in the line" sampler, at least in my case. Certainly, the most interesting aspect of ShojoBeat, aside from Nana, was the preview chapters. The first chapter of Beauty is the Beast warned me off of that title, and I bought the Kamikaze Girls GN based on that preview. But most months, it was just the six stand-bys and a lot of articles aimed at the sixteen-year-old female audience which I, if you haven't noticed previously, am not a representative sample thereof.

Anyways, this way I get the omake chapters at the end of each volume, which I had been missing out on. Now when is someone going to publish Neighborhood Story in the States?