EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

Single illustrations posted one at a time on social media were bound together here, with the texture of a whole world written in around them. "Bunkasai Soapland" stands in the hall as a picture-story that holds its reader through the care taken over its premise.

The premise is that at a school festival, class 2-C has chosen a soapland as its attraction, and the book is an omnibus that portrays the students of that class one by one. It belongs to the type of work set in an invented world where the norms of sex have been swapped with those of reality, and in the hall it also appears in the Incest and Onee-Shota divisions.

The book is built not from panel-to-panel storytelling but from a succession of single images, and the author's own afterword concedes that it is an unusual construction for manga. The drawing, which readers liken to four-panel comic strips, is loose and soft, and for that very reason the worldbuilding is what carries the reader. The premise that the attraction is a long-standing school tradition is held throughout. The material added for the book (character profiles, a column styled as a guide's write-up, a bonus strip about the work behind the scenes) sets out with humour how far the story's common sense lies from the reader's. Many reviews also point to its brightness, without a trace of pathos.

Matsu Ryuta, the artist behind the circle Poison Gray, serialized the series on X one illustration at a time; this 166-page book adds extra pieces from a supporter platform and new material, and appeared on both stores in July 2023. After two low-priced single chapters it was the circle's third work and its first substantial volume. On release day it took No.1 in DLsite's overall daily ranking. The many readers glad to own it outright, without a subscription, record that even in an age of social media and supporter platforms a bound book was still wanted. Further volumes have followed every July.

It stands 110th among the hall's doujin works, 3rd in the Incest division and 13th in Onee-Shota: the first book of the series that became the circle's banner.