The Fall 2023 Manga Guide

The Ice Guy and the Cool Girl

What's It About? 

Sparks fly between the handsome descendant of a snow spirit and the oblivious coworker he has a crush on! A romantic comedy in an office setting that takes coworkers to lovers to new heights within a winter wonderland of emotions!

Himuro is a modern-day ice god, an ordinary office worker who just so happens to be the descendant of a snow spirit. He's also besotted with his coworker Fuyutsuki, who's a little unusual herself. At first glance, the pair both seem to be calm, cool, and collected. But beneath Himuro's icy good looks rages a passionate blizzard of love! On the other hand, his coworker's cool facade belies nothing about any feelings she might have for Himuro in return⁠—because she's too oblivious to realize anything! What's a snowman in love to do?

The Ice Guy and the Cool Girl has a story and art by Miyuki Tonogaya. The English translation is by Julie Goniwich with lettering by Lys Blakeslee. Published by Square Enix Manga & Books (October 10, 2023).

Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris

Rating:

Like many other one-joke sketch-based rom-coms, The Ice Guy and the Cool Girl takes a minute to get going. The premise it premieres with is dead simple, more of a first draft of character ideas than anything approaching an actual high concept. So for several chapters that barely crack five pages each, we're treated to riveting descriptions of how Himuro…sure does have snow-spirit powers that signal his emotions or how Fuyutsuki…sure is cool in how she reacts to him and gets him to crush on her. As a couple of strips of sight gags and extremely slow-burning (or slow-freezing, I guess?) romantic tension, it's fine, but it doesn't indicate what it might do with such an iced-over setup.

However, just a few appreciable aspects can hook you in, even as Ice Guy is still warming up (or cooling down?). Himuro's incidental icy indications of his feelings are fun in that they're a relatively common kind of visual manga metaphor that happens to be 100% literal in this case. They help express how Himuro is the one with the gap-moe appeal in his icy exterior and how he winds up melting into a blushing mess whenever Fuyutsuki does anything cool to him. Conversely, Fuyutsuki's appeal as a character succeeds because she is simply that cool, as her straightforward stylings don't obscure her existent but understated kindness. It's all tied together by the point that shallow starting setup or not, Miyuki Tonogaya absolutely can draw the crap out of some exceedingly cool people, so I can see how just waving these characters around for the first few chapters might've been enough for this one to gain some traction.

And thankfully, the manga does start moving a bit as this first volume goes on. Not much, mind you. Ice Guy continues to know exactly the kind of placidly-paced love story it wants to be. But the romance manifests a bit more cutely, and hey, Himuro even manages to ask Fuyutsuki out on a date in the first twenty pages, so their relationship isn't frozen in place. And that little nudge speaks to the real core appeal of this manga, I think, in how it lets us see a burgeoning love story between two grown-ups whose personalities are pointedly not predisposed to wild, outrageously comic reactions. Stuff like Himuro's core personality, his habit of worried overthinking, that's an exciting element of disposition apart from all the snow magic stuff. Seeing that, or witnessing the mutual crush from Fuyutsuki's point of view a couple of times, brings this story up by the end of its brisk first volume to present a love story that can feel sufficiently warming (or, well, you know).