Written & Art By Kakifly
Yen Press
ISBN: 978-0316254243 & 978-0-316-25423-6 |
Floating on the popularity of the K-ON! manga, comes two follow up graphic novels that chronicles the Sakuragoaka Girl’s High Schools music club members’ lives after their high school graduation. K-ON! College shows how Tsumugi, Ritsu, Mo, and Yui take on their first year of college and adjust living away from their families. Despite life’s new challenges, their love for music remains and they join the college pop music club. Azusa didn’t graduate with the rest of the club, so in K-On! High School she tries to recruit new members. She succeeds, except none of the new members know how to sing or play any musical instruments.
Kakifly continues with the four panel strip that the typical format for many comics in Japan and what he employed in the K-ON! series. Four panels is a very small space to tell a story. Kakifly treats each four panel strip as a single instance in the narrative with very little flow from one strip to the next. They are one gag strips typical to newspapers and webcomics. The jokes aren’t that humorous. Something might be lost in the translation or the Japanese have a different concept of one gag humor. The characters are stuff, relying on their cuteness and genki ambition to tell a story. The story is very basic as well. As soon as it gets interesting, the comic switches to something new.
K-ON! College and High School is a cute slice-of-life high school story and that’s really all there is to say about it.