The Spring 2023 Manga Guide

K-On! Shuffle

What's It About? 

There was once a high school band whose pop songs warmed and thrilled the hearts of all who listened. Now, three girls have been inspired to start a pop music club of their own, but will things turn out like they hope? It's a new generation of slice-of-life hijinks from kakifly, the original author of K-ON!

K-ON! Shuffle has story and art by kakifly, with English translation by Stephen Paul and lettering by Rachel J. Pierce. Yen Press will release its first volume both digitally and physically for $15.00 on April 18.

Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris

Rating:

Out of the gate, K-ON! Shuffle seems uneven by modern standards. The original K-On! was foundational to the "Cute Girls Doing Cute Things" concept, although the genre really has evolved since that period, exemplified in the likes of the razor-sharp iyashikei execution of Laid-Back Camp or the hard-hitting personal attacks of Bocchi the Rock!. My primary issue with K-ON! Shuffle is that the four-panel format feels very incidental to the storytelling. Often, panels simply flow in a straightforward narrative, clean through multiple strips, instead of setting up punchlines. It's hardly playing to the strengths of comic timing afforded by the format, making the choice feel obligatory more than anything else.

This isn't to say that K-ON! Shuffle is devoid of jokes, as it indeed does great with the kinds of light, ambient humor and smart use of the small panel size for doodling funny faces. Yukari and Kaede start out with a clearly defined friendship dynamic that makes them likable, and I'm not going to not enjoy Maho regularly making a disaster lesbian out of herself around Kaede. But Maho getting roped into the music club in the first place still feels only obligatory to filling out the cast, as incidental a beat as the deployment of the four-panel format.

K-ON! Shuffle does start to come into its own with the characterization. An amusing scene relatively early on clarifies that Yukari is actually not entirely the airheaded archetype she at first seems to represent, and the other characters serve multiple roles. That might be the "Shuffle" in the title, that the tropes so popularized by Original Recipe K-On! have been remixed for this modern-day B-side. Shuffle certainly isn't instilled with reverence for its forebear, taking multiple potshots at the classic's popularized propensity for hardly playing much music, while making learning and practicing instruments a central feature of itself. It still loses track of some plot threads as it goes on, but there are enough ideas and ambition here that I can appreciate. K-On! hasn't risen to the highest levels of modern slice-of-life fluff, but Shuffle at least makes an effort to keep up.

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Ah, the "cute girls" genre, a literary form more (or at least equally) invested in the charms of its characters as it is in having a plot. K-ON! was foundational, and while it's never been my favorite, it certainly did do a fine job blending light humor, plot, and quirky girls. K-ON! Shuffle is basically a remix of what made the first series work; if you liked the original, there's a good chance that you'll enjoy this one, not least because there are both guest appearances from the original cast and gentle jabs at their expense.

This variant of the story takes place at a different school, and two of its four heroines are inspired by a performance at the original school to start their own club. Or rather, to join their school's nonexistent club; Yukari and Kaede aren't necessarily the most observant pair when it comes to things outside their interest. In part, this means that the unwitting are easily pulled into their orbit, although it definitely helps that Maho appears to be harboring a crush on Kaede. A lot of the early part of the book's humor comes from Maho not quite knowing what to do with the other girls. Though it is a familiar trope, it works here largely because none of the girls are quite the stock characters they at first appear to be.

Like the original, K-ON! Shuffle is a four-panel series, which both works and doesn't in equal measures. Creator kakifly doesn't always use the format to its full potential, resulting in some strips that are just series of talking heads, while others are much more adept at using both visual and verbal humor. It also takes a bit longer for the story to get going than it strictly should, considering that the book's only a little over 100 pages long. But mostly this is simply good-natured, harmless fun, a worthy successor to its parent series.

Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

I never expected a "cute girls doing cute things" manga to pop up in 2023, much less a spin-off of one of the OG "CGDCT" series, K-ON!. While only lightly referencing the events of the original series (and occasionally showing off the original cast in the background), K-ON! Shuffle stands on its own as a unique series about a group of girls exploring music separately. And... Well, the cute girls do cute things.

The series is arranged as four-panel strips (remember when almost every show was based on a 4-koma comedy series?) to tell of the group's story. There were some cute dynamics between the casts, such as learning the ins and outs of their instruments, the challenges of buying new instruments, and the despair of not getting better as quickly as you'd like—that's about it. For better or worse, this is a "cute girls doing cute things" manga. The worst thing that could happen is someone doing a wild take after getting called out for their idiosyncrasies.

To be clear, K-ON! Shuffle is funny, and the dynamics between the expansive cast make their interactions entertaining. It's refreshing that the new band isn't just a copy of the original light music club. The first volume also keeps the stakes low. It's been long enough since "cute girls doing cute things" was a thing for anime and manga for us to appreciate K-ON! Shuffle's merit instead of being a mere sequel. It's a cozy, light read that probably won't budge the needle too much. It's still enough, I think, to earn it a light recommendation.