EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

Yamamoto Kumoi left behind exactly one collected volume, and this is it. Marble Cake enters the hall on a record: fourth place in the 2003 readers' poll, and a readership that has kept it in circulation long after the artist left the commercial magazines.

Published under France Shoin's X Comics imprint, it is a loli-genre collection of ryoujoku stories, the brutal strand of the genre known as kichiku. Ten pieces from COMIC ZIP and Akaneshinsha's Hinakan are joined by a bonus story. Settings include a shopping-street lottery, a school, a brother and sister's home and an orphanage, and the plots take ordinary events and rules as their point of entry.

What readers single out together is the gap between a soft, clean art style and the harshness of the material. The book was recommended in a retrospective poll in 2011, and a reader of the digital edition welcomed the chance to own the artist's only book. Both voices hope for Yamamoto's return.

Yamamoto later moved on to Akaneshinsha's COMIC RIN, but appearances grew fewer, and new work in commercial magazines stopped around 2008. A good deal of it was never collected.

In the Eromanga Taisho for 2003, the book placed fourth. The print edition dates from 2003, and a digital edition appeared on FANZA as early as 2008. The year on the roster, 2009, is that of the DLsite release. It stands 229th among the hall's commercial works.