EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

A single volume of adult manga can turn out to be chapter one of an epic that runs for more than a decade. PANDRA: White Desire, Black Hope stands in the hall as the place where one such epic began.

Shirley White transfers into a school of magic in search of Pandora's Box, the artifact said to grant any wish. Behind a face like a doll's she keeps a power of her own, and with tentacles and summoned beasts she closes in on everyone who might know where the box lies. The story opens with her as the one who takes — and the positions of taker and taken do not stay where they are put.

Erect Sawaru's drawing does not break down. Even at the height of a scene, when a face has come apart, the underlying form holds and the line stays clean; readers say so again and again. The weight of flesh, the mass of the tentacles, the sheer volume of fluid on the page — all of it excessive, and all of it legible. You always know what is happening to whom. The inversion at the center of the book, a girl in the aggressor's role, works only because the drawing keeps that clarity. Comic Unreal was founded in 2006 as a magazine for women of magic and monstrous power, and no title carried that editorial premise further than this one.

Five years after the artist's debut, this is a fourth book. The world would be handed on twice more, and most of his career grew out of it.

An adult animation followed. Both volumes appeared in English from FAKKU, and the artist was a guest at Anime Expo in 2016. Among the hall's commercial works, this one sits first.