EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

Insolence, all on its own, can carry a book. Seichouchuu no Masegaki ni Ai no Shisshin Acme Shidou stands in the hall as nine stories built on that single premise.

A stepsister, a tanned and boyish classmate, the child next door whose mother never comes home. In each piece the girl first shows how sure of herself she is, and from there she is taken apart. The order never varies. Only the three magical-girl chapters at the end change register, opening onto a different seam of tentacles and eggs.

Hikoma Hiroyuki draws for the sense of touch. What readers return to, again and again, is that they hear sound in panels where no sound effect has been lettered. A brown body with tan lines against a pale one. The thinness of a bone and the flesh just beginning to gather over it. Most of this artist's labor goes into never repeating the same body twice. The harshest chapters and the almost tender ones share a single volume, and that swing keeps the book moving to the last page.

It is a fourth collection, gathered from work published in COMIC LO. Six years after the debut, it is the thickest book yet from an artist who has dug at one subject and no other.

Among the commercial works in the hall it stands fourteenth.