When it comes to hentai manga, there are plenty of incredibly talented artists. There are even a bunch of artists with a widely known name who get regularly published. However, there’s a special echelon of artists who manage to make a name for themselves by crafting not just Evangelion doujins and sexy one-off NTR manga, but create intricate worlds and unique, multi-volume narratives of their own. Erect Sawaru is one such artist, and thanks to Fakku, everyone can start to experience his dark, tentacle-fueled world of Pandra.
Rather than an anthology of individual stories, Pandra is made up of 8 chapters that tell a much longer, interconnected narrative. It all starts in the first chapter, titled The Corruption Begins. After a brief flashback to a mysterious mother and son talking about Pandora’s Box, we come to the present day and get a view of the entrance grounds of Olympus Royal Magic Academy. Students are pouring into the school entrance, and one of them is our protagonist, a mysterious transfer student named Shirley White. She has beautiful white hair, a slender body, small chest and an obsession with a mysterious box. As she meets fellow students like her classmate Riley or the rambunctious Fumika, all she can seem to think about is tracking down that box.
When Fumika starts asking some especially leading questions, though, Shirley becomes suspicious. She corners the student alone in the Student Council room, and out of nowhere, Shirley begins to make out with Fumika. What was seemingly a random kiss quickly leads to more serious events, as Shirley summons a swath of tentacles and begins breaking Fumika’s mind in order to obtain the location of the mysterious box. While the first half of this chapter is devoid of sex and consists entirely of story content, things immediately go off the rails in the 2nd half. Intense tentacle action is the name of the game here and is a recurring theme in the entirety of Pandra. There’s also a healthy amount of futanari play in this chapter, too, as Shirley shows off just what kind of magic she’s skilled in. Normally, tentacles don’t really do much for me, but the fact that these slimy appendages were being manipulated by another girl added a layer to the events that I was definitely intrigued by.
The art in Pandra is also intriguing, although not entirely without its faults. Erect Sawaru is an extremely talented and legendary artist, but this first volume of the Pandra saga is some of his earliest work ever. As a result, while his style is certainly unique, it’s still in the process of being established and has some specific weak areas. Characters eyes are wildly far apart from each other, and while they look fine in certain scenes, a majority of the time these characters look like one of their biological parents was a fish. Anatomy, in general, is a bit of an issue in the art here, mostly inoffensive but sometimes being a bit too distracting.
Thankfully, when it comes to hentai, the more adult aspects of the art in Pandra are a delight. Characters have huge, pillowy breasts that naturally bounce, fold and squish as they’re toyed with by an endless array of tentacles. Getting to read this story fully uncensored is a treat because there’s a sharp amount of detail put into the sexual anatomy of everyone and everything drawn by Erect Sawaru that adds even more enjoyment to each page. Despite some rough edges in the overall quality of the art, at the end of the day, Erect Sawaru still manages to knock it out of the park.
While there aren’t a lot of colored pages in Pandra, it’s perhaps for the best. There are a handful of full-color pinup illustrations at the beginning of the volume and their quality is dubious. One of them features a pair of girls being ravaged by tentacles, and the perverted appendages are rendered with realistic and disgusting blood-red tones and pale, rotted flesh colors that nearly made me sick. The other pages feature women having sex with some good ol’ fashioned regular dicks, but the colorwork here is iffy thanks to some poorly blended shadows and strange flesh tones on the sexual anatomy of the males.
Thankfully, there’s a decent amount of sexual content in Pandra involving normal guys ravaging big, beautiful women that is rendered in simple black & white. Without spoiling too much of the surprisingly in-depth and engaging story of Pandra, the last two chapters of the book shift focus a bit and transport us to a different time period to learn the tragic story of a mother and her son. The mother, a tall and curvaceous beauty with sexy glasses and massive breasts, lives in hiding due to the persecution and execution of witches. Her son, in order to help keep her safe, goes out into town regularly in order to shop for her and buy anything she might need. Despite being a peaceful witch who only uses her abilities to try and make medicine, witches are hunted on sight in this world the moment their brand is discovered.
Unfortunately for the son of this witch, he also bears the brand on his arm. One day when walking through town, he bumps hard into a nearby guard and has his sleeve torn apart by the edge of the guard’s armor. With his sleeve destroyed, the mark of the witch is fully visible on his arm, and the son is quickly arrested along with his mother. As the son sits in his jail cell in silence and agony, his mother is chained up and tormented by the guards elsewhere. What begins as pure torture soon turns into raunchy action as the mother offers to do anything in order to spare the life of her son.
Up to this point, Pandra was almost predictable in its repetitive use of tentacles when it came to the sex scenes of the manga. Despite the dark subject matter, it was nice to get a change of pace in the naughty sections of the story with the human gangbang scenes in these last two chapters. As with the rest of the volume, the art in these scenes is insanely erotic and really well done, despite any awkward anatomy and far-spaced eyes. For people following Pandra for the narrative, these chapters also put a shocking wrench into the story that makes things ripe for an epic conclusion in future volumes, if Fakku decides to publish those.
Pandra is an incredibly interesting hentai manga. It isn’t the best work of Erect Sawaru by far, but it’s certainly his most iconic. It’s the beginning of a massive and iconic adult franchise, and being able to own it or read it simply on that merit is a treat. Still, there are pages of sexy action and gorgeous girls in this book that make it the promising start to an incredibly erotic collection of stories. Pandra by Erect Sawaru is available at our shop here, along with many other great hentai manga series.
