EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

An artist who produced roughly one story a year turned five years of work into a single collection. Houkago no Yuutousei, Sasamori Tomoe's first print book, stands in the hall as the volume that topped a specialist store's chart for its year.

It is a collection set at school, portraying the hidden sides of girls who look like model students. Eight stories that ran in COMIC Hot Milk between 2012 and 2017 are joined by one newly drawn piece; the keynote is romance, and nothing turns dark.

What readers agree on is characterisation built on the gap between a plain, earnest exterior and what lies beneath, along with the drawing of faces. The carefully finished pages change temperature from story to story, a hushed piece set beside a bright, breezy one. One critic, observing how the stories register change in people through small differences accumulated over repeated days, finds in this a handling of time that only comics, laying panels side by side, can achieve.

The artist is known in doujin circles for popular works such as Succubus Stayed Life. Taking in the four stories of the 2015 digital collection Yuutousei ni Hitsuyou na Jugyou, this book gathered the commercial work into print for the first time.

Published by Core Magazine in 2017, the print edition was the year's best seller at Toranoana's Akihabara A store, third the following year, and twenty-second in the store's all-time ranking. In the reader-voted Eromanga Taisho 2017 it was one of five titles tied for first place. It stands 164th among the hall's commercial works.