The CLAMP Project: Introduction

CLAMP is like a rock band. A bunch of women with a shared love for their art get together and move to Tokyo to break free of their amateur status and make it as professionals. Along the way, a few people drop out, leaving a core group of four who live and work together to create some of the most enduring manga of the 90's. More than 20 years later, they're still working together and their books are still being republished in new shiny editions around the world. (Forget Bakuman. The real manga I want to read about manga creation is an autobiography of CLAMP).

What impresses me the most is that instead of getting credit as individuals, CLAMP worked under one name, a name that became its own brand. When you pick up a CLAMP work, you expect a certain type of story: fantasy or science fiction so removed from science as to be fantasy, where the stories are filled with magic and adventure. CLAMP works are never mundane.

The artwork stands out, as well. Detailed pages filled with flourishes. Cat-like eyes and sweeping cascades of magical energy. Fantastic costumes. Androgynous  heroes with broad shoulders. . Beautiful women. (CLAMP appreciates beautiful people of all types). A certain disdain for normal human body proportions.

The CLAMP brand is a strong one, and for a while there, I was buying anything by them that I could get my hands on. X, Cardcaptor Sakura, Chobits, Angelic Layer, Tokyo Babylon - I have great memories of reading all of them, but aside from returning to Cardcaptor Sakura three years ago, I haven't bothered to reread any of them since their English publication.

There were two other things I never bothered to do. I never read any of their works before Tokyo Babylon and I never finished Tsubasa or xxxHolic. I picked up the first Magic Knight Rayearth omnibus a few months ago and it got me to thinking. Why was it that I had never read it before? Why was my brush with CLAMP fandom limited to their mid-period works?

I have a couple theories. First, the earlier CLAMP artwork scared me off years ago when those series were first published in English and I was just starting to read manga. The eyes are so huge, so heavily lined, so catlike that I didn't want to read anything with them. The style is strongly CLAMP, but it's also strongly Other. As a new reader, I was drawn more to the series that more closely approached the styles that I was familiar with. 

Another reason might just be timing. I wonder if those mid-period CLAMP works are remembered so fondly because they were released exactly at the right time. Manga was fairly new to the US audience, and certainly to me. I was trying out anything that I could get my hands on in Borders. The CLAMP series, like Chobits, were just flashy enough - just foreign enough - to get my attention, but not enough to scare me away. 

By the time that Tsubasa and xxxHolic came around, I considered myself a fan, both of manga in general and of CLAMP in specific. But there was so much manga coming out in 2005 that it was hard to keep up. Due to a change in jobs I moved twice, and soon I found that I could barely even keep up with reading each month's issue of Shojo Beat, let alone read anything else. I fell behind on CLAMP series, and I never bothered to catch up.

I'm going to fix that now. My goal is to read through all of the CLAMP series available in English, starting with RG Veda and ending when I'm either caught up or I've had enough. I want to find out if my fond memories of the CLAMP series I have read are because of nostalgia, or because they really are that good. I want to see what I was missing by skipping out on the rest.

Throughout the whole thing, I want to see if I can figure out why CLAMP works at all. Why is it that these four women created so many series that were so popular? Just what is it that makes CLAMP special?