The CLAMP Project: Episode 1: RG Veda

CLAMP's professional debut, RG Veda, was first published in 1989 in Wings magazine. Wings is a shoujo magazine featuring fantasy stories for an older audience. It's where Tokyo Babylon would eventually run, and also was the home of Antique Bakery, The Demon Ororon, and Princess Ai. I love looking at the context of the magazine where a manga originated, but in this case we have a less popular magazine from 20+ years ago, so it's hard to find information in English.

RG Veda takes its themes and names from Hindu mythology, which I haven't read much about since taking some religion classes in college. Mostly, I'm familiar with the names because of their use as summons in various video games. This creates an odd affinity to certain characters that is completely unrelated to the manga. I find myself liking Ashura because I played on the Asura server in Final Fantasy XI. 

That type of thing happens when you draw from an existing framework to create your story: your readers are going to bring their own experiences with them. It allows for some lazy storytelling - it's clear that a character named Hercules will be incredibly strong, and that Oedipus will make some terrible relationship decisions. But it also allows for juxtapositions - your readers will be expecting Achilles to have a fatal weakness, but they won't expect it to be in his thumb.

It's an effective way to do a debut: start with something familiar and then add your own spin. New readers won't be completely lost, and you may find an audience in fans of the original.

In order to keep from bringing too many expectations with me, I'm not going to read up on the source material until after I finish RG Veda. Afterwards, I'll take a look at where CLAMP made changes and injected their own sensibilities. 

Tokyopop published RG Veda in English starting in August 2005, right in the middle of my manga buying drought. As a result, I never picked it up. Like everything from Tokyopop, it's now out of print, so I had to track it down used. Most volumes are fairly cheap, but a couple seemed to have shorter print runs and are more rare. Those ran from $20-$30 used. I averaged about $10 a volume for the 10 volume series - not a terrible deal for out of print manga, but right at the limit of what I'm willing to pay.  I'm hoping that this will be the most expensive part of the CLAMP project, but I have fears about the other Tokyopop releases that I never bought, like CLAMP Campus Detectives and Man of Many Faces.