I just ordered vol. 1-3 of the NGE manga series and was wondering what the difference in the Special Collector's Edition and the normal ones are? I bought the CE ones because well I figure they would be better. Or did I make a grave mistake?

Did you make a bad mistake? Possibly.

Here's the deal.

Back in the day, all manga distributed in English was flipped to read left to right, rather than right to left like the Japanese. The sound effects were also converted into English text rather than Japanese katakana. But the artist Sadamoto wanted it left in its original format. As a compromise, Viz published Evangelion in both standard left to right with English SFX, and a special collector's edition that read like the Japanese. This 1st edition format was used through volume 7. When volume 8 came out, they redesigned the format to update it to make it more consistent with the publishing format of newer titles. This began the second edition format which was much like the special collectors edition, reading right to left, with Japanese SFX, and slightly smaller than the 1st edition formats.

What this means for you is that at some point, you'll have to buy your Eva manga in the new format. You can potentially buy volumes 4-7 in the original special collectors edition, or you could buy the second edition version. Some people like the 1st editions, because they're a bit bigger, and some dislike that the 1st editions clip the edges of the art a bit more than the 2nd editions. But it doesn't matter a whole lot. I prefer the 2nd edition format. It's closer to the original Japanese, and it has more supplemental materials.

So basically it's just my manga reading preference? I normally like it when they keep it as close to the Japanese version as possible and only change the text from Japanese to English. The sound effects I don't mind because after reading so many manga and study Japanese a bit I can understand most of the noises.

Thanks for the info, if possible I would be nice to keep this open for people that may ask other question involving this CE version.