Ice-Head Gill: Unedited Audio and Recording Notes (Patreon)

Manga Details:

• Author: Ikuo Hachiya
  • Notable people they were an assistant for:
    • Gen Osuka
      • on Doron Dororon (source here)
  • Other works:
    • Seiryu no Magoi (2022, Shonen Jump Plus, ONE SHOT)
      • A powerful student who uses his strength for profit has his life change when he meets a kind girl
• Publishing:
  • Run Dates:
    • June 26, 2023 to November 13, 2023
  • Series it replaced
• Mashle: Magic and Muscles by Hajime Komoto (18 vols, hit)
• Series that replaced it
  • Shadow Eliminators by Kento Amemiya
• Series that started at the same time as it
  • Martial Master Asumi by Kawada (1+ volume, ongoing)
• Chapters/Volumes:
  • 20 chapters/2 volumes

About the Manga

• Plot
  • After his father Dreki killed the prince along with his 7 warrior students, Gill was chased out of his home in the capital only to wash up on an island run by a Dommy Mommy named Mela. In a book belonging to Dreki, Gill reads about evil liches from hell who kill people and possess their bodies. There are four relics which can close the gates of hell and hidden within the book is one of them: a  cool necklace. Conveniently a lich shows up immediately afterwards and possesses a villager, but Gill uses his father’s axe, the king’s axe, to kill him. Gill then sets out to find his dad and get the relics. Gill makes it to a town where he meets Sana, a girl from the Rani tribe who have been punished by the king to live alone and in misery. She has escaped and steals things. After Gill defeats a guy who’s mad at her, his brother, a guy with boomerangs who was blinded by gill’s dad shows up to fight them. In the middle of the fight he’s taken over by a lich, but Sana reveals that she has a relic: a bow that shoots wind arrows, and is able to help Gill fight him.
  • 
    
  • Just then a guy named Greatest Frey appears and slices the lich apart with his sword. As it is defeated the lich tells Gill that his father is currently being held by the leader of the liches: the true king, and is in the process of being possessed. Greatest then takes them to meet his assistant who is literally named Sliz, and reveals that he’s one of the king’s generals. They were ordered to kill Gill and Sana but instead take them back to meet King Ond. A bunch of shit happens and we learn through flashback that Dreki was the king’s older brother who was cooler than him. The king tells Gill to go into the troll forest and kill all the liches there. They rush over just as the liches begin their assault and Gill sees his cool troll aunt. She gets killed almost immediately by the leader of the lich attack who is possessing the body of one of Dreki’s students and wields a hellfire relic. Sana’s arm and leg are cut off but a little troll girl gives her an apple from auntie troll’s tree branch hair, and it heals her, giving her an arm and a leg with sick tattoos. Auntie troll was the book of wisdom, a being with photographic memory who can speak all languages and retains history; Sana has now taken over her role. With her dying breath Auntie troll was able to read Gill’s cool necklace and say that the relic is “here” and just then the necklace opens and a little star thing fuses into Gill’s body.
  • 
    
  • The star thing gives him water powers, but because it’s so cold the water becomes ice. Gill uses his ice powers to drive off the lich invasion. They follow the lich army back to their HQ where they meet the lich king who has fully possessed dreki’s army and fights back. The lich king flies over to the human capital where he captures the king and lets his army run rampant. Gill makes it back and uses his ice and axe powers to defeat the lich king for good. But now they have to close the gates of hell. Gill uses his water relic, Sana uses her wind relic, and then the earth relic is actually a combination of Greatest and Sliz’s swords. The fire relic however is extremely dangerous to use. The king is prepared to give his own life to use it but then Dreki’s body magically stands up and uses it himself to close the gate permanently. Years pass and the king dies of the illness, passing the throne on to his nephew, now known as Ice Head Gill title drop.
  • 
    
• Characters
  • Gill
    • What an ugly fucking design
    • Another gon wannabe
    • Hates eating alone
  • Sana Rani
    • Wears a big hat
    • Tricky dicky
    • Thief
    • Has a magic bow
  • Greatest Frey
    • Looks like a woman
    • Swordsman
    • Super powerful
    • Womanizer
    • Fun idiot

Why it Failed

• This art feels soulless and what an awful character design
• So much fucking exposition at the start, I feel you can tell how bad a manga is by the sheer amount of shit it tries to seed
• I feel like it’s missing some connective tissue for how the world works, like what is the taxes?
• It has a lot of tonal issues like Mela is literally extorting the population but the serie wants to make her sympathetic?
• I so badly want to like this series but it makes it hard
• Everything is energy all the time like the second chapter is just beat after beat it doesn't feel organic
• The paneling is weird like why show gill entering a guy complaining about the food then a shot back to gill to give context and then jump back to the food guy
• This really is just doing things the author thinks is how you make good manga without understanding
• So little character development tossing in a background is not character development
• I honestly struggle to understand some of the conversations like the entire king conversation about the mission and execution

What it Did Well

• I did giggle at the frozen laundry joke
• Nordic inspiration is cool
• You can tlel this has some cool mythology in it
• Some of the imagery is cool like the holding everyone back image
• It at least tried to do what it thinks are good ideas like establish characters backstories
• Liches look cool
• It's an interesting development how the liches have already killed their villain so defeating them always has a cost

Where it Could Have Gone

• Actually show some depth to the liches what does it mean to be these immortal beings that take over bodies. Imagine if they were able to give a second life to people dying or using the bodies of braindead people or something
• Honestly you probably could have made this Nordic hunter x hunter and it would have been really fun
• Just make the axe a relic. Simplify and take your time.

Misc Thoughts

• I wonder if it did a snow background cause then it could be lazy with the backgrounds lmao
• So I wonder how much GOW influence given the whole ice axe thing
• Maxy Bee thoughts:
• Viking helmets did not have horns. Hachiya admits this in the volume extras, but says he used them because they looked cool. Honest.
• Dreki’s group of warriors is called Nidhogg/Níðhöggr, after the dragon that gnaws upon the roots of the world tree. Dreki also just means dragon. Dragons all the way down.
• The Dainn Royal Antlers are named for one of the deer that eats among the branches of the world tree.
• The Hræsvelgr Royal Wings are named for the Eagle who sits at Heaven’s End, the originator of wind.
• The Ratatoskr Royal fangs are named for the squirrel who runs up and down the world tree, sending messages between the eagles and the nidhogg.
• Gill’s name is just old norse for like a river or ravine. Sol is, of course, the sun.
• King Ond’s name seems to come from the Icelandic word for duck. The action, not the bird.
• The fear of eating alone is called solomangarephobia.
• The Rani were a real west slavic tribe! They were around from roughly the 9th century up until 1168, at which point they were defeated by the King of Norway and the island of Rügen they occupied was subject to Christian conversion, eventually becoming a part of Germany.
• The relic Gleipnir is named after the impossible to break chain that held the wolf Fenrir, made of the sound of a cat's footfall, the beard of women, the roots of mountains, the sinews of bear, the breath of fish, and the spittle of birds.
• Idunn the troll is named for the norse god of fertility, who famously produced immortality-granting apples.
• Do they even acknowledge Varthur is a Rani? Or that Orden’s surname is Sol?
• Munin the crow man is of course named for one of Odin’s two crows, Hugin and Munin.
• Slepnir is Odin’s Eight-legged horse.
• Volume extras include:
  • Design notes (including pre-serialisation)
  • 4-panel gag strips
  • Some cute sketches
  • A relationship chart for the king and his men
  • An ‘Ice-Head Saga’ closing page from Sana Rani, because this is a book, remember?
• You should have ‘one of us will get Gill’s haircut’ as a patreon milestone.

Final Verdict

• Six Word summary
  • Community
    • Tucker: Shiny Viking paint, cheap shonen interior
    • Maxybee: “So no Ice-Head?” *breaks phone, skateboard*
    • Chickenwarlord: Lackluster lich encounters leave audiences cold
    • Diego (Phantom Seer): Not a Demonslayer from the north
    • Glornak Ironspawn: Capricious Child Challenges Calloused Caregiver's Conviction
    • Isekai Sensei-Sama 🎙: Cold child chops chilled corpses chaotically
    • Kermit The Grog: Atrocious action axes ambitious adventure account
    • Kpt.Kluless: Dedicated Do-gooder defiantly defeats devilish demons | Interesting Concept but its poorly axecuted
    • LordAnubis, #1RedHoodFan/Mourner: It was axing for the ax
    • Luffy0321: Again, needs more Dommy Mommy (Aunty)
    • MaxyBee: (Over)Alliteration awkwardly alters any attempt at(organisation)
    • Meru (Francisco): Gils Unimpressive Narrative Does Axe Material
    • Redblade: Oh god not again
    • Riel: Let me axe you a question'
    • Spike: Interesting ideas spun into generic axe
    • SuperDave: Cooler Heads Did Not Prevail Here
    • The Laughing Fool: Frozen potential melts over critical fires
    • 𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕸𝕱 𝖄𝖊𝖙𝖎: Careful with that axe, Gill Sol [insert Roger Waters screeching noises]
    • The Wolf The Wood The Trafalgar: Battling Bogus buffoons baffles bewildered bibliophile | Nobody beats Gill with the axe
    • Watchtower: Boy boy Boy boy boy Boy
    • dackerson:
      • Scandinavian
      • Setting, Slicing Satanic
      • Scary Sorcerers
    • Redblade: Broken Record Baby Dont Stop (Gloating)
    • Resident Warhammer Nerd: Axing liches is our speciality, chancellor
    • Spike: Might I AXE you a question?