堀さんと宮村くん 1

Really interesting reading this after having read the ホリミヤ | L23 adaptation. While the plot is basically identical, the manga adaptation really fills things out (and occasionally reorders things, or incorporates the side material), to have a more cohesive story, while also dropping certain scenes. Honestly, I got burnt out on ホリミヤ in the latter parts of the series, so it's nice to come back to the very beginning, when things were a lot more wholesome / enjoyable.

Unlike the adaptation, this is a 4-koma, and it makes great use of color. The art style is a lot rougher and more sparse, but also has more edge/character to it. I can see why this is the more popular version of the two in Japan.

Language learning: the only people this will really be useful for are people who have strong kanji knowledge and want to work on their handwriting recognition (like the type you see scrawled in manga, not the type you learn in apps/textbooks). Otherwise just read the ホリミヤ manga, which even has furigana.

Easy-ish Language, Horrible Handwriting

I don't quite know how to grade the difficulty of this, honestly. If you're familiar with the later manga series or anime, there are a lot of shared scenes and moments, but there are a few ones that seem to not have made it into the later versions.

Words are largely either "I know this automatically" or "this scribble is too incomprehensible to try to look up even by radicals", making it not all that useful for language learning other than as an exercise in reading bad handwriting.

If you really can't get enough of these characters (like me) it's got enough additional content to keep things fun an interesting though!