I didn’t. I failed
And since then, I hold an unhealthy grudge about people who carelessly recommend any kind of manga for beginners, or publish those sort of list, without adding the giant caveat that this kind of material is extremely hard at this stage…
Between N5 and N4, I tried Yotsuba. This one is touted everywhere as the perfect manga for beginners, the one manga that should be read as early as possible, and I want to punch the face of every single person who uttered this nonsense. Yotsuba is HARD so early. I spent hours agonizing over the first 30 pages or so before giving up.
Between N4 and N3, I tried to read Aria the Materpiece, following the Beginner Book club in Wanikani… Well, my failure is still visible on this forum, you can see my posts in the thread of volume 1, at first very motived, asking tons of question… only to disappear quickly. I tried hard, but again after 30 pages or so, and a double digit number of hours spent, I gave up.
After those two crushing blows, I retreated for a while to the safe waters of graded reader, then later NHK easy news and Satori reader, anything actually designed with language learner in mind really, and just continue to study with conventional methods, learning grammars, learning vocab, classroom etc.
But wait, there is actually light at the end of the tunnel ! Between N3 and N2 I picked up native material again… and discovered that my level was finally good enough ! It still a lot of lookup, a lot of pain, but now I can finally make sense of most of what I read if I put the effort. (and recently I re-read the first 30 pages of Aria and it was just magical. I read them almost effortlessly, fully enjoying the story, it was soooo satisfying )
Anyway, it vary a lot from people to people, so it’s difficult to give general advice, but for some kind of person (maybe with low linguistic intuition and low tolerance to ambiguity ?), reading any kind of native material before reaching a sufficient general level can just be too difficult and really demoralizing. If you poured a lot of effort already and it still feel completely impossibly hard, retreating to easier materials and waiting a bit for your ability to rise before trying again is not a bad idea !