EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

Rather than lining up separate stories, it builds a single country and a single school and lets its romances live there. Monster Romance stands in the hall as the book in which Mizone carried one world through from the first page to the last.

Set at a school in a country where non-human races and humans live side by side, it is an adult series in the monster-girl genre, telling of romances between human students and non-human heroines. There are stories of a dullahan, a centaur, a mermaid and others, and at the centre of it all is an ice oni who keeps humans at arm's length and the classmate who confesses to her.

Each chapter can be read on its own, yet all of them belong to the same world, and the stories around the ice oni and her sister in particular are read as a continuing thread. Readers single out this ensemble construction and the feel of youthful romance between students. The clearest sign of how thoroughly the world is built is the mermaid heroine, who speaks in a script of her own that the key in the afterword lets the reader decipher.

It is the fourth print collection by Mizone, who debuted in book form in 2015, and the second from Bunendo. It gathers a series that ran in COMIC BAVEL through 2019, and unlike the earlier short-story collections it binds a whole volume into one world.

The Japanese original, Ishu Renai, was published in 2020, and FAKKU brought out the English edition. One of the artist's five works in the hall, it ranks 203rd in the commercial hall.