K-On! Shuffle Volume 2 Review
A fair amount of time has passed between the releases of the first two volumes of this musical comedy manga spin-off. Indeed, you might want to go back to the first volume to refresh your memory. However, the adventures of a new girl group inspired by Ho-Kago Team Time continue to entertain.
The girls at Hikarigaoka continue to make progress as members of the school’s Pop Music Society, with Yukari on drums, Kaede on bass and Maho on guitar. Also alongside them is Riko, who doesn’t play anything but knows a lot about music, and Shinano, who has recently returned from a long trip abroad to learn about her favourite kinds of music.
In this second collection of yonkoma strips, we see the girls buying new equipment and learning to improve their technique using some odd methods – namely via basketball. However, the main development is the introduction of new characters. First is Kano Yamamoto, and a bass-playing old friend of Shinano’s who thought their relationship was over when she went abroad, and now wants to make up. Little does she know that Shinano wants to make up with her because she didn’t speak with Kano for weeks before she left. This was just because Kano couldn’t be bothered to turn up to the society meetings.
The biggest development though happens at the end of the school year when the group perform live for the first time. The result of this is that in the next year, two new girls join the club. One is Risa Kawabe, a wannabe singer who is constantly checking the school’s rulebook – just to see how fashionable she can be without breaking the rules. The other is her intimidating-looking friend Ranka Ootake, who is dragged along by Risa but in the end takes up the guitar.
The introductions of the new characters are the highlight in this book. Risa is probably my personal favourite, mainly because of her cheekiness when it come to just how far she can push her fashionableness, but still keep within the school rules. This reading of the rules actually comes to the help of her society members when they discover one part of the rulebook which is actually out of date.
As for the production, the manga begins with some nice colour pages, and contains translation notes in the back. Letterer Rachel J. Pierce uses a wide variety of different fonts to convey the feelings of the characters. As mentioned in the review of the first volume, some readers may not be keen regarding translator Stephen Paul’s move to avoid the use of accented letters and instead go with a more direct phonetic spelling of the names. This is perhaps most clearly seen with Ranka’s surname “Ootake” instead of “Ōtake”. However, I personally have no real problem with it.
The biggest problem though remains the fact that this spin-off can never get out of the original’s shadow. This isn’t exactly helped by the long gap there has been between volumes, with this second volume taking a year to come since the first. Most K-On! fans will still remember the original cast, but trying to remember the details of the new one may be harder, especially if you have not gone back to read it since you first did all that time ago. Regardless, in some ways Shuffle still has its own ways to entertain.
Our review copy from Yen Press was supplied by Diamond Book Distributors UK.
