Yonekura Kengo

At last here’s that Yonekura Kengo post I’ve been promising. This is a creator who’s been on my radar for quite a while; her Pink Sniper tankoubon is one of a small set of eromanga (along with Sesshu Takemura’s first volume of Take On Me - though, for obvious reasons, not the second! - and Isutoshi’s Slut Girl, on which more another time) translated by Studio Proteus (the translation house also responsible for the US version of much of Masamune Shirow’s comics output) and published by Fantagraphics’ porn imprint Eros Comix. However, it wasn’t until recently that I found out that she is, to the extent that such things can be ascertained, a woman, which prompted me to take another look at her body of work.

As far as I can tell, her erotic work (at least under the name Yonekura Kengo - there may be other work under different pen names) comprises the following titles:

• The Yellow Hearts: an ongoing erotic drama about the lives of a circle of delinquents and criminals and their significant others. Chock full of sex and violence, but the focus is always on the characters’ emotions and relationships. 
• Evergreen: a one-shot tankoubon erotic melodrama about the sexual relationships between a student, his best friend, and his two sisters, in which reality (surprisingly for the genre) actually ensues. 
• Warau Kangofu: a collection of short stories, many of them revolving around an older woman dominating a younger man. 
• Pink Sniper: a series of humorous and fantastical short episodes about a brassy school doctor toying with a proud but masochistic student at a school also attended by animal people for no particular reason.

I’ve shown some of her work to friends with a much stronger background in woman-created erotica than mine, and they say that they can perceive a woman’s touch in the focus on faces and the attention paid to the men in scene composition; I’ll take their word on it. All I can say is that Kengo’s art is well-rendered and appealing, and I particularly like her voluptuous, predatory mature women.