EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

To carry a whole volume on a single body type. Tsugou ga Yokute Kawaii Mesu. takes that difficulty on and sees it through, and stands in the hall for having done so.

The girls across the ten pieces are built from entirely different temperaments. One squares up to a teacher. One is a young lady whose eyes are opened by a book she picks up. One is boyish and troubled about not being girlish, one is long-lived and only looks like a child, one is a little sister indulging her brother. The drawing of the bodies, meanwhile, does not move: a low head-to-body ratio, a slight chest, a stomach with barely a waist. Readers take that consistency as the artist's own insistence.

Atage's craft lies in the allocation between what moves and what does not. With the figure held fixed, every change gathers in the face and in the dialogue. A childish way of speaking, heavy on hiragana, comes apart by degrees in the middle of the act. What keeps the speed of the fall from reading as implausible is the speed of that lettering. That nothing bleak is left behind at the end is another observation surfacing again and again, independently.

A first collection, gathering short work from COMIC LO and its sister magazine. The artist has gone on publishing one-shots in the same title since, and a second volume arrived six years later.

English-language databases carry an entry with an English title. Among the hall's commercial works it sits thirteenth.