Awesome Manga Magazine

|119x170px|Zen Plus cover

Hey, have any of you all come across a manga magazine called Yen Plus? I stumbled across it in a rack at my local comic store, and picked it up mainly because it had cover art of Soul Eater (I'm the lone fan of the anime on the podcasts) and a slick-looking manga called Jack Frost.

The magazine is rather awesome, to be honest. It has Japanese, Korean, and American manga, so one half is left-to-right (the Korean and American parts) and one half is right-to-left. I enjoy a dominant percentage of the series, too, which surprises me. (Then again, I had a similar reaction to Shonen Jump when it first started.)  Among the notable series are Higurashi, Bamboo Blade, Maximum Ride, Nightschool (by Svetlana Chmakova, creator of Dramacon), and the aforementioned Soul Eater and Jack Frost. It's mostly shonen, with some shoujo and comedy mixed in.

The mixture of content's what surprises me most. With Shonen Jump out there, I expected that any competing manga magazine would be left with the dregs. But this stuff is good; clean action, consistent anatomy, solid character designs, and interesting stories (I was particularly amused that this issue of Jack Frost is narrated by a schoolgirl's severed head).

Obviously, if you don't like shonen, or you're looking for something incredibly Deep And Meaningful, this won't do much for you. But this is just darned fun.

My lone copy is from November 2008, and it's their fourth issue, so they haven't been around for a while. I do hope they can keep going; the American anime industry could really use another good, solid manga magazine right now to solidify the fanbase.