Amid the growing concern for parents about the mature content in Mixxine, Mixx realized that they would have to act fast to save "Sailor Moon." After all, it was their flagship title, and if the other series were bringing it down, then things would have to change. This resulted in one of the biggest blunders Mixx/Tokyopop ever decided to do: They abrubtly pulled "Sailor Moon" from Mixxzine. But wait, it gets worse. The series was moved to a new magazine called "Smile," which was intended to attract mainly female viewers. This move was made without any prior notification, and I didn't know about the change until I bought a copy of Mixxzine and "Sailor Moon" wasn't there anymore. But wait, it gets worse.
Not only did they pull the series out of the magazine without letting anyone know, but when I picked up "Smile," I was baffled: This WASN'T where the story had last left off! In fact, the chapter that was in this magazine was something I hadn't read before. Mixxzine left off in the middle of "The Dark Moon" arc (one of my personal favorites in the series), and this...well, whatever it was, it wasn't Dark Moon. I found out shortly afterwards that Mixx had indeed skipped ahead in the story. The stuff in the middle - you know, the end of the second story arc and all of the third story arc - would be released in basic comic book format.
Boy, was I pissed off.
It was bad enough that Mixx pulled a fast one on me in the first place, but I wasn't in any way going to buy a magazine, and then let it collect dust while the comic book caught up. It just wasn't going to happen. That was the only issue of "Smile" I ended up buying. In retrospect, I think I let my anger get away with me. The magazine DID have "Peach Girl" and "Juline," two series that I did enjoy. But I digress, we don't always think straight when we realize a big company just royally screwed us over. So I continued the series in comic book form. Now, this wasn't really any different except for two things: At $3.99 an issue, it was less content for more money, but a nice trade off was that we got full blown Sailor Moon artwork as covers.
This was the first comic book series I collected since "Sonic The Hedgehog" where the covers were so good, I pinned them on the walls of my room. No, I didn't cut the covers off, I simply put the comics in those plastic collectors bags and pinned those to the wall. Around this time Mixx released the first trade paperback of the series. I held off on buying it because I had the same stuff in the Mixxzine magazine, but eventually scanning through all those magazines just to read Sailor Moon seemed a little silly, so I put down $10 for the book.
This is where I'm going to deviate a little from the set course we've been on so I can point this out: "Sailor Moon" proved why I typically don't like trade paperback manga. And no, it's not because this book was in poor quality (though I couldn't argue to this day that it wasn't), but re-reading something that I had practically memorized I had read it so many times, the smaller artwork struck me as criminal. Sailor Moon has beautiful artwork, and only with a full sized comic page could you truly appriciate it. The smaller pages just did Takeuchi's beautiful art injustice. This is why I'll probably never throw those old comics away: Because the trade paperbacks will NEVER look as good as those comics until they are of that size!
Since "Sailor Moon" I've amassed a large collection of trade paperback manga, but stuff that I've read in magazines first ("Yu-Gi-Oh!," "Ranma 1/2," "Dragon Ball," "Shaman King") have always looked better at their full size over the graphic novels. I didn't buy another Sailor Moon trade paperback until I was forced to so I could read the "The Dream Arc" and "The Stars Arc." One night though, while I was picking up the latest issue of the comic, the comic store owner had a surprise for all us Sailor Moon fans: He was going to show us subtitled episodes of the first two seasons of Sailor Moon that DiC skipped. This was to be my first real taste of Sailor Moon in Japanese.
Next Episode: I get my first taste of what the Japanese version of Sailor Moon is like.
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