EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

A first book that gathered every story from the start of a career went on, in its year, to top a readers' poll and to place high in the annual store charts. Hajirai Break stands in the hall as the point from which Homunculus set out.

It collects twelve stories that ran in COMIC Kairakuten between 2009 and 2011. A young man who ends up sharing a home with two women, a university student working at a detective agency, the single mother next door, a cousin back from abroad and the fake romance the two of them stage: this is a collection of sincere romances among university students and working adults, with one hypnosis story among them.

Readers agree first on how evenly the drawing and the storytelling are matched. In a clean, composed style the heroines are given distinct temperaments, and their embarrassment registers in the face alone. Reviewers return again and again to the way each story lands its ending, and to the epilogue drawn for Bird Cage when the book was assembled.

Homunculus debuted in Kairakuten in 2009 and received the Ohimesama Prize in the magazine's new-artist competition; this is their first book. Readers praise a finish hard to credit in a debut, while the wavering still visible in line and panel layout is read as part of the flavor of early work.

The print edition came out in May 2011 and placed third for the year at Toranoana's Akihabara A store and fifth in FANZA's annual mail-order comics chart. It entered EHOF on its first place in the 2011 Ero-Manga Grand Prize, a readers' poll run by volunteers on the 2channel message board. An English edition, Bashful Break, also exists. It stands 129th among the hall's commercial works.