K-ON! High School Manga Review
けいおん！high school Manga Review

***MILD SPOILERS***

With our musical, female quartet of Mio, Tsumugi, Ritsu, and Yui having graduated, Kakifly-sensei decided to not only do a sequel featuring those girls in college, but also to do a sequel to show what happened to Azusa-chan in her 3rd and final year of high school. Thus we have K-ON! High School as other of the two sequels to that original manga series.

As with K-ON!, K-ON! High School is mostly a 4-koma manga (comic strip) with an occasional, traditional manga chapter. Azusa is the lone member of the Pop Music Club, but her two best friends Ui (Yui’s younger sister) and Jun decide to join. Two new characters are introduced to join the club. The first is Nao, who’s not good at music, but can write songs. The second is the blonde Sumire, who’s designed to take Tsumugi’s place as the club maid (Tsumugi having always made the tea and brought the snacks). Further, they make Sumire Tsumugi’s maid who’s only there to get the tea set she donated to the club back.

K-ON! High School continues the slice-of-life stories with Azusa and company forming a new band after getting enough members to keep the Pop Music Club alive. While there’s nothing wrong with this one-volume manga, without Mio and company, it becomes a different manga, yet it tries to retain its old identity, at least to some degree.

One weakness of the manga was the premise of bringing Sumire into the club. She’s been ordered by Tsumugi to get the tea set she donated, but then midway through the manga, suddenly there’s a retconned change where this order was just a ploy by Tsumugi to get Sumire into the club. *_* So what would have happened if Sumire got the tea set successfully? Meh. I like Sumire as a character, but the whole back story with her is rather weak since it is totally retconned.

On the Yen Press side of things, as before, they included a lot of color pages. As such, throughout the manga, there are color pages when those chapters were colorized in Japan. The core Japanese honorifics are retained.

As happened in the K-ON manga, Azusa is called “Azusa-meow” instead of “Azusa-nyan” whenever she talks to Yui on the phone. As I stated in my K-ON manga review, while “meow” is the accurate translation of “nyan”, saying “Azusa-nyan” fits better as “nyan” is being used to substitute for “chan” and so flows better in my opinion. A simple translator note explaining the Japanese onomatopoeia of nyan would have sufficed. However, by this point, I’m guessing continuity trumped what I feel should have been.

As before, Yen Press has translator notes (two pages), but also as before, they reverse the flow of things when publishing them. As I said before,

I have NEVER understood why some publishers thing that after reading an entire book “backwards” (by Western standards) that we’d suddenly see straight forward text and go, “Hmmm. Text means must read Western style or universe come to end.” *_* Being that there are only two pages, it isn’t quite as bad, but it still makes NO sense to reverse the flow of page reading just because you have text in the page. It is quite jarring and irritating.

In the end, K-ON! High School manga is an OK continuation manga. It isn’t that it is a bad manga, but without Mio and company, it just didn’t quite work as well for me. However, it will still make it to my reread stack of manga titles.