K-ON! (Keion!), by kafifly. First published in 2007 and first published in North America in 2010.
PLOT:
Yui is a rather ditzy girl looking to join a club at school. She ends up getting roped into the music club by its energetic leader Ritsu, alongside the shy girl Mio and the kindly Mugi. Together they decide to form a band, but they keep getting distracted by things like instrument shopping, cake, teaching Yui how to play music, cake, various holidays, cake, parties, cake...wait, it's time for them to give their first performance for the school?!
STORY:
K-On! is often sold to others as 'the moe series for people who don't like moe,' although this is usually applied more to its animated adaptation than the manga it was sourced from. Speaking as someone who is deeply skeptical of 'cute girls doing cute things' stories and who found the show too inane to watch beyond a single episode, I can state for the record that this is absolutely not the case. The anime can at least lean upon its fine animation and flashy OPs and EDs to distract from its utter lack of story. The manga is not so fortunate.
While K-On! never strays too far from its core concept of girls forming a band and enjoying fun and friendship, it is easily distracted from this and often derailed. Every time they attempt band practice or a study session, someone inevitably breaks out the baked goods and before they know it nothing has been accomplished. You know it's bad when the translation notes have more substantial content about music (including some very brief primers on how to read music and guitar chords) than the manga itself.
Of course, you could argue that K-On! was never about the plot but instead about the characters and their interactions. If so, then maybe kafifly should have tried a little harder to give these girls personalities. Like so many of their ilk, the K-On! girls are all defined by their signature quirk. Ritsu is mischevious! Mio is shy! Mugi is...er...um...rich? Yui is so oblivious to everything that she might possibly have brain damage! They don't really change in any noticeable way and every punchline about them is just harping on the same few quirks. It's sad that the most interesting character here was Ms. Yamanaka, a music teacher who serves as the club's advisor. Even then, her gimmick is not a complex one (her perfect public image hides a love of hard rock and guitar shredding) and most of the jokes involving her are the usual mean-spirited ones about her being terminally single.
Some people are into the idea of series that about cute girls hanging out. They like the gentle tone, the simple characters, and the emphasis on quiet, everyday moments. Meanwhile, I was dying for this series to feature anything other than cake and friendship. Both might be pleasant and sweet in small doses, but in this concentrated form it is stupefying and dull.
ART:
This is a 4-koma manga, so the standards for the art are already pretty low. The character designs are all too typical of the time this was made, all squishy roundness, big eyes, barely existent features, and all of it rather flatly shaded. Backgrounds are nowhere to be seen. The girls barely move, lest they spend even a single panel being something other than generically cute. Save for a few gags, there's little in the way of traditional fanservice. It's the sort of unremarkable art that came to define moe manga in the late 00s, although there is a lot more color art featured here than you typically see in these sorts of 4-komas.
RATING:
K-On! isn't really a comedy and it isn't really a story about music. It's just pointless fluff, the manga equivalent of cotton candy. I can't imagine that anyone would get anything out of it over a decade later that they couldn't get with far flashier presentation from the anime.
This series was published by Yen Press. This series is complete in Japan with 6 volumes available. All 6 were published and are currently out of print.
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