Sakura of DOOM

Yeah, it bears a lot more resemblance to a comics-format YA psychological novel (with a protagonist who's apparently so detached from his own non-intellectual feelings that he doesn't even realize his fascination with the mysterious new boy across the street could be construed as a crush until most of the way through the first volume) than it does to the average BL manga. This may well have hurt its reception at the time, since TokyoPop was really pushing it as BL. The editor even made some rather misleading pre-publication comparisons between "Off*Beat" and TokyoPop's then-recent BL release "FAKE," when the two series really had little in common besides a relatively unexplicit m/m element (the characters in "Off*Beat" never even got to the kissing stage by the end of volume two) and being set in New York City. The closest specific comparison I can come up with is that "Off*Beat" is somewhat analogous to a more polished-looking but less humorous (and more mystery/science fiction-oriented) equivalent of the one-high-school-boy-obsesses-about-another webcomic "Always Raining Here" (http://alwaysraininghere.com/). I'd definitely like to read the final volume, but I wouldn't say it's the greatest high school m/m story ever.

Marfisa from Livejournal