Artem Wrote:Just to be clear though, I shouldn't be dead set on trying to translate things into romaji to understand them as I learn the basics of kana and kanji?

Essentially correct. Eventually, you should learn kanji to kana.

If you know kana, you will pick up romaji easily/quicky - that will help you type (worry about that later).

Just make sure that when you begin to learn pronunciation, learn it from the kana, not from the romaji, or you will pick up bad habits. For example, when you get to it, learn this:

らりるれろ　
たちつてと

and NOT this (do this later or you will pick up bad pronunciation habits):

ra ri ru re ro
ta ti tu te to

Good luck!

Artem Wrote:Mangajin's Basic Japanese Through Comics (v. 1) - Same here, is part 2 a huge help or is part 1 enough?Link

Since nobody's explicitly answered this yet -- part 2 is basically more of the same; it's a further collection of columns. As others have said, there's not really any structure to it, but if you're getting your structure from somewhere else it's an interesting read. My recommendation is to learn your grammar somewhere else and then read these for examples and the occasional interesting new take on something.