Megan B. Moore at Broken Frontier reviews a couple of the initial offerings from the Shojo Beat imprint, including Fushigi Yugi: Genbu Kaiden, Ouran High School Host Club, and one of the current favorites in our household, Ultra Maniac. Moore comments,
one thing that stood out to me was that, with one exception, the dominant “girl meets cute guy and develops a major crush” theme in most manga is either absent or sidelined in these first volumes.
Which is fine with me; I don’t object to romantic storylines, but I like to see variety, especially for kids in this age group.
Incidentally, the concept of co-branding the books with the magazine has worked spectacularly well with my daughters. They already know that they will probably like a book with a Shojo Beat imprint, and they forced me to buy “Ultra Maniac” immediately after seeing the little disc of it that was included in the first volume of the magazine.
