EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

Sennen Reijou: My Lady, My Master stands in the hall for setting two strands with entirely different aftertastes side by side in one volume, and letting the drop between them show the full range of its artist.

The first half is the five-chapter title series, a fantasy in which long-lived women, elves, a dragon and a fox spirit among them, some with centuries behind them and some more than a thousand years, appear one to a chapter. A final chapter drawn for the book brings the series to a happy resolution. The second half holds three stories, a science-fiction piece set on a space station and two Man Eater stories, all from the hard end of assault fiction built around non-human creatures.

Most readers name this contrast first: a series that closes in sunlight and single stories that give the ending one more twist and leave the reader in the cold, all from the same hand. The short pieces are said to fold their invention into the world itself, as when one builds its idea on how a Medusa's body might work. The way the drawing sets beauty against the grotesque is also counted among the book's pleasures.

This is Fan no Hitori's fourth book. After Dolls appeared from T.I.Net, the artist came back to Kill Time Communication for this one. The two Man Eater stories continue, six years on, a series first collected in Dropout, so that the first book and the fourth are joined here along a single line.

Published in 2020, it entered through the sales gate and stands 62nd among the hall's commercial works.