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 book in which Erect Sawaru's PANDRA saga began.

Set in a school of magic, it follows Shirley, a transfer student with powers of her own, who has come in search of Pandora's Box, the artifact said to grant any wish, and who uses summoned beasts to press everyone who might know where it lies. In subject matter it belongs to adult tentacle fantasy, with sexual violence by tentacles and monsters at its centre. With the enigmatic Shirley as a kind of master of ceremonies, each chapter shifts its focus to another character, until flashbacks late in the book uncover part of a hidden truth and hand the story on to the next volume.

A review published in the month of release observed that the artist's growing skill now reached the monsters too: tentacles and creatures had become wet, living things on the page. Readers note that however dense the drawing gets, the line stays clean and the figures keep their shape even in the most crowded panels. Comic Unreal was founded in 2006 as a standing home for women warriors, sorceresses and the inhuman, and this book gave that editorial premise the form of a long narrative.

It inherits the setting of the previous book, Injutsu no Yakata, and arrived five years after the artist's debut as a fourth collection. A critic writing that same year singled out Erect Sawaru as the embodiment of Kill Time Communication's commitment to long-form work. The world would be handed on twice more and run until 2022.

In its year of release it placed 20th in the annual bestseller list of Toranoana's Akihabara store A. It was later adapted as an OVA, both volumes appeared in English from FAKKU in 2019 and 2021, and the artist was a guest at Anime Expo in Los Angeles in 2016. Among the hall's commercial works it sits first, and it heads the artist's eight books in the hall.