We all have times where we screw up. It could be as something minor, such putting a bendy straw in your drink upside down. Or it could be more significant, like realizing you left home without your wallet. Sometimes, it’s relatively minor, but knowing that other people noticed makes it so cringeworthy! Other people, however, are better at laughing their awkward moments off.
Well, the four stars of Play It Cool, Guys all have tons of everyday screw-ups. And they each have their own way of handling them.
These four guys all have names, but most readers will just know them as by their personality type and/or their hair color. The blonde-haired high schooler, for instance, lies that he meant to do that whenever he does things like put on his jersey backwards. But as he soon finds out, no one is buying his act. Then we have the spacey businessman who just moves on, one college student who looks on the positive side, and another who laughs it all off.
The manga introduces us to them one by one, each starring in their own chapter with an ending that passes the baton to someone else. Then, once that’s done, two of them officially meet, and another pair officially meets. And then who’s up next? Why, all of them, of course! But that’s for the next volume.
I expect the group antics will do the manga a service, as the final two chapters with the pairs are better than the solo ones. In the solo ones, Play It Cool, Guys is rather dull. The lead monologues as he navigates his mistakes while all his friends and acquaintances enjoy and/or observe the entertainment. Sure, the businessman has a concerned senpai, and the blondie vents his frustrations to his sister. But these conversations tended to be one-sided; the final two chapters had much more interaction and playing off of each other. In their narrated solo episodes, the young men are a bit emotionally lost, that their forgetful ways tend to be a barrier with their everyday relationships. But now, they have people in their lives operating on similar wavelengths, and while they each “play it cool” in a different way, they have a chance to be thoroughly impressed or shocked instead of keeping up their persona (or, at least think they’re keeping up their persona) constantly.
And while I am a bit bummed by the meh-ness of this opening volume, there’s a good reason I’m more apt to continue than I would be otherwise: the art. Specifically, the fact that all 140 pages is in full color.
Not only that, for each chapter, the space between panels (and this is a series that tends to stick with large, separate boxes) are all done in a different color. The rainbow edges of the book are very eye-catching. The art inside may not be anything fancy on a technical level (and I wish the businessman and the positive student had different hair colors, as their “moving on” attitudes tend to result in similar facial expressions), but the colors do make everything pop out and gives Play It Cool, Guys an anime-like vibe.
Still, colors alone can only carry a manga so far, and the story has some work to do in being as cool as the guys want to be. The last two chapters show signs of promise, and I want to return to Play It Cool, Guys to see if the group antics can deliver on that potential to be fun comedy for the dork in all of us.