4/24/24 🎉🎊🎁🎂💙

Nata Kokone's new official Ichikura Hayate's birthday art

Cool Doji Danshi Vol.5

Some official manga/comic art by the artist: "Nata Kokone" or @natakokone that were used to promote the upcoming TV series for "Cool Doji Danshi" or "Play It Cool Guys" on twitter; Seen @cooldoji_PR

クールドジ男子

Play it cool, guys

Volumes 1-5 + Novel

Recently read this volume of Play It Cool, Guys and I love these goofy goobers so much!! 😭😭😭

I felt all the happiness and definitely need to make it a goal to reread the first three volumes before volume five comes out next year!

One of my all time favorite josei series!

PLAY IT COOL, GUYS VOLUME 1

Play it cool, guys, Tome 1

Kokone Nata

idk there’s just something so like. refreshing??? in how cool doji danshi unapologetically embraces modernity and how it intersects with the characters’ lives/the way they make mistakes. hayate forgot to plug in his phone charger. shun’s bluetooth earbud fell out when he shook his head. mima and his colleagues play a fps zombie video game to promo it. souma tells igarashi to just use the maps app whenever he gets lost. it's not even just tech stuff, because igarashi makes up a series on the spot and gives it a "modern manga title". and the movie advertisement??? the fact that we see people were sharing everything related to it on twitter??? they were posting their mistakes and sharing what they found funny??? everyone is connected, online, plugged in, whatever you want to call it and nata kokone never treats it as a bad thing in cdd (and, no, this isn’t about them blindly devoting themselves to the age of the internet - net generation teacher was a whole commentary of itself on the dangers of social media and the harm it could potentially cause!). like. nata kokone really truly does feel like someone who grew up during the rapid technological shift and actually understands both sides - it’s good and useful and can make people happy and less alone, but they’re also aware of the darker shadows within it. they make absolutely brilliant use of it in storytelling and i’m SO in love with it

New official art to commemorate anime 2nd cour

I just finished Sensei mo Net Sedai (The Net Generation Teacher) a 2-vol manga by Nata Kokone written in 2018-19. It’s so good. And there’s a casual gay character! One of the students is in love with his male best friend, and it’s not simply hinted at. It’s not a love story (even if it does deal with unrequited love) so there are no romantic developments, but the acknowledgement that his feelings are indeed romantic is still more than you’d normally expect from a non-BL

It’s not full-color like Cool Doji Danshi, it’s a regular b&w manga, which felt a little weird tbh, but the art is still beautiful. The first volume focuses more on the male students and not always knowing if someone on the net is who they say they are, starting with the titular net-generation teacher, Ueda-sensei, having a photo of him dressing as a schoolgirl when he was 20 being used as the profile pic of a twitter account and one of his students falling for her. The second volume focuses more on the female students and unrequited love, including the childhood friend of the gay character who’s liked him since they were small and always assumed they would date. I dunno if I’m doing a good job of selling it, but I felt the topics were handled well, and I really enjoyed it.

Also, Ueda-sensei looks quite a bit like Mima lol I think Nata-sensei might have a type

This has an English translation (it’s under the English subtitle and it doesn’t have the last 16 pgs of ch 9 though) so I def recommend checking it out! (although I haven’t checked out the translation myself so I can’t guarantee the quality, only of the story) At least part of it is on Nata-sensei’s pixiv too (though in Japanese, of course)

Manga Spotlight: Fluffy Reads

If you are looking for a fun and easy read, try out these manga series!

They are all lighthearted, funny, and upbeat...just what you need to cheer you up, make you laugh out loud, and put a smile on your face!

Descriptions provided by the publishers

Those Not So Sweet Boys by Yoko Nogiri

When a hard-working Japanese high school girl falls for a bad boy, she discovers that he and his friends lead lives that are nothing like what she imagined.

Play It Cool, Guys by Kokone Nata

A bunch of dorky guys in school and life try to look cool every day.

My Love Mix-Up! Art by Aruko ; story by Wataru Hinekure

Aoki has a crush on Hashimoto, the girl in the seat next to him in class. But he despairs when he borrows her eraser and sees she's written the name of another boy - Ida - on it. To make matters more confusing, Ida sees Aoki holding that very eraser and thinks Aoki has a crush on him!

Find them in our collection in print or on Libby!

See more of Kate's recs

Today's song is those last minutes by ADYXSHA featuring the Alter/Ego voicebank NATA and the Vocaloids Gumi and Kokone

PLAY IT COOL, GUYS VOLUME 1

i reread/watch cool doji danshi when i'm extra unstable and it's so effective at calming me down it's actually bonkers

Hello!

So I im currently reading the manga volume 7, as that one just came out in my country, and I noticed that in chapter 30, when motoharu asks Mima how he and Hayate met, he answers (translated from German): “I hit on him” (“Ich hab ihn angebaggert”) and I was like?? Yeah you kinda did, but I didn’t think the mangaka would actually write that or that the characters would ever acknowledge it, much less Mima realising he did that. But then it also never gets elaborated when motoharu asks for an explanation

So yeah, have you read chapter 30 yet? What were you’re thoughts? Or did the translation/whatever language your reading it in make the Dialoge something else?

Also, do you think that the “I hit on him” could be a hint to what could come or how their relationship could potentially evolve?

hi!! i'm sorry, you say "volume 7" and "chapter 30" but to my knowledge those haven't even been released yet - volume 5 was the newest release in japan, it isn't being released in america until october, and on kokone nata's pixiv page she's only posted up to chapter 26 (and i don't speak japanese, so i'm not ENTIRELY sure what's in the volume 5 chapters she's posted, but i skimmed through them and it doesn't look like anything that matches the convo you described). unless germany has been publishing chapters already released in some kind of different format that splits them apart into thirty, there perhaps might have been some kind of mix-up with what you've read, because i definitely haven't read anything like that yet.

could you possibly be talking about some of her other illustrations on her pixiv/twitter? i don't know too much about those since they're not translated, but in the case that somehow this is part of the series - i don't think it would have been a mistake for mima to say it, and i don't think it's out of character for kokone nata to do so. i guess it also depends on the quality of your publishing company and how much you know about/trust them to handle things because there's always a chance that something got lost in the process, but imo that seems very much like a standard mima (and by extension, kokone nata) thing to do! he didn't realize it himself exactly, it was probably the way hayate had reacted in the first place ("sorry, i'm not a girl") that led to mima making the joke like that. if it didn't get elaborated, it's probably for the laughs - cdd is a slice-of-life comedy first and foremost, and while miscommunication sucks in drama, it's HILARIOUS otherwise.

in terms of how their relationship could evolve - based on what you've said about it i do believe that it was played off as a joke, but i do think hayate's got the most adorable celebrity/puppy crush on mima (and igarashi too! just any capable cool adult, which i relate hard to LMAO). tbh from what i've read i really think mima sees hayate as a younger person to take care of. now with igarashi in the group, we can clearly see that kokone nata often divides them between the "older" and "younger"; shun, hayate, and souma are often all grouped up together (hanging out at the cafe, movies, walking sakura, etc), and igarashi and mima are usually stuck together as well. there is a possibility that how mima sees hayate might change in the future, but for now i think they're content with what they have!

i hope that helps! and if it doesn't then feel free to expand more, especially bc i'm curious on where this is coming from! or if any other followers has any ideas and can help out, that'd be great too!