Though I’ve been away from the series for a while, I recently read Volume 8 of the Hidamari Sketch manga. Rreleased in the US as Sunshine Sketch, it covers Sae and Hiro’s transition to college and the arrival of a new girl named Matsuri. With graduation and all that it typically entails in anime and manga, I expected this volume to be the last, so color me surprised when I found out that the series is still continuing.

Fan favorite K-On! had a similar change, but while I loved the move to college for K-On! and the transition into a new environment, I also know I’m the exception. It’s very telling that the series didn’t continue much longer after that. If I try to look at it from an unbiased perspective, it was perhaps too sudden a change in terms of how time seems to flow (or not flow, as the case may be) in K-On! Prior to graduation, Azusa is the only major underclassman in that series who was also a club member, and the rest were all of the same age. As a result, when they go to college, the focus shifts sharply away from their familiar and beloved high school setting, while the girls who remained in high school don’t have quite the group dynamic that readers loved over the years (even if Ui deservedly got more of a spotlight).

I don’t think Hidamari Sketch will have that problem, or at least not quite so much. When the series began, it was already about senpai and kouhai, whether that’s Sae and Hiro in contrast to Yuno and Miyako, or how later characters both older and younger are introduced. There is a greater sense of the forward progression through high school, even if Hidamari Sketch is moe slice of life comedy at its most mellow. Also, because it’s only a part of the cast moving on (not to mention that Sae, Hiro, and probably even Natsume still show up), the transition also doesn’t feel quite as jarring.

I’m looking forward to reading more, and I’m especially looking forward to Miyako as a terrifying high school senior.

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