Love Manga goes through the sales charts and points the way to a couple of articles. Broken Frontier reviews the first issue of Shojo Beat and there’s a review of the old school title Grey over at Comic Book Resources. I have to dig up my old issues of Grey, it was a great apocalyptic hard science fiction story.

One new manga that I read on my road trip was Yotsuba&!, by Kyohiko Azuma, the author of the funny four panel manga Azumanga Daioh. Yotsuba is a girl who is so clueless and/or innocent about the world around her that when she encounters everyday objects like a swing or an air conditioner, she misinterprets everything. In the first volume Yotsuba moves to a new neighborhood with her father and gets accustomed to her new surroundings. I was laughing out loud several times while reading this manga, the humor at times reminded me a bit of a more slapstick Amelia Bedelia. Yotsuba should appeal to a wide age range – I thought it was much funnier than Azumanga Daioh, and the characters are charming. ADV is releasing the English language version.