3 out of 5

Okay, by now it’s established that I enjoy previews, that I will review them, and that I believe the Titan previews to generally be of better quality than most.  Since they’ve switched over to quarterly books, the excitement to be had in flipping through is a bit diminished – since a lot of titles will repeat – and maybe that makes me a bit more critical of the editing, but it also seems logical that if these things are putting put out more frequently, they won’t be as vetted.  This edition has a couple quite notable gaffs though, including some pages where text in the preview images (in the dialogue bubbles and narrator boxes) is stripped out, and one (Skydoll) in which the text in the image overlaps quite a bit.  In both cases this _could_ be the actual look of the page, in which case I’d question using it for a preview since it looks weird, or it _could_ have been purposeful (in the blank text examples at least), to, like, not distract from the art, or maybe they weren’t translated yet – in which case I’d say just remove the bubbles and boxes fully, don’t just blank ’em – or… something.  Dunno.  But the end result is still that it looks weird and / or bad.

This is in combination with Titan’s moving away from including actual preview pages and instead generally falling back on covers, which doesn’t tell me much about the content.  Still, the overall design of the book is appeallingy clean, the structure is sensible, and the copy is generally informative.  I’m glad the company has enough things going to put out regular previews, but I do fear their turning into throwaways versus things I actually use to prep my shopping.