Some Thoughts on CLAMP

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“And everyone lived happily ever after?”
“Well, no, almost everybody died.”
— David Addison and Agnes DiPesto, Moonlighting

(Spoilers for the ending of xxxHOLIC are within this article)

I’d been going back and forth about what to write for this month’s Manga Moveable Feast. I could always just punt and link to the many prior CLAMP reviews I’ve done – but that would be wrong. So I started pondering titles of theirs that I really enjoyed that I could discuss. Man of Many Faces, CLAMP School Detectives, Card Captor Sakura, Magic Knight Rayearth, Wish, Suki…

Hey wait, aren’t those all over 12 years old? Why don’t I talk about the more recent CLAMP series I’m a huge fan of?

…oh.

Yeah, it’s time to come out and say it. While there’s lots of recent CLAMP stuff I enjoy for a certain character, or a story arc, or maybe an interesting idea to start things off… when it comes to modern CLAMP I always find more problems than I really want to. It’s not even that they used to ‘write happy endings and now they don’t’, as I sometimes whined about on Twitter. RG Veda, Tokyo Babylon and X are not exactly happy fun times. And Kobato is a recent light and fluffy series that really never appealed to me at all.

As CLAMP have matured over the years, they’ve gained a depth to the quality of their storytelling. And while this is normally a thing to applaud, I think with their group it highlights that they come up with fantastic ideas and are not always so good at following through. Their first major epic will likely never be finished, partly due to events beyond their control and disagreements with Kadokawa Shoten, but also I think due to a lack of desire to return to it (let’s face it, I think if they really wanted to, X could be completed, apocalyptic earthquake images or no). Chobits was their attempt to write a seinen manga that also examined the otaku obsession with perfect virgin toys, but it was designed to discomfit as much as entertain, and also had enough fanservice that I felt they were trying to have their cake and eat it too.

Then there is Tsubasa. It has to be said, the main reason why I have so much difficulty with CLAMP in the 00s may be Tsubasa, if only due to its kudzu-like qualities. Tsubasa was CLAMP starting up a ‘star system’ for their characters, similar to Tezuka, where beloved characters we’ve seen before are shown in new and different roles – particularly Card Captor Sakura’s stars. And I quite enjoyed the first few volumes. It ran in Weekly Shonen Magazine, so there was a lot of action and magic, as well as the usual CLAMP BL tease between Fai and Kurogane, the manga’s only two ‘original’ characters. Indeed, seeing Sorata and Arashi as a happy couple (well, as happy as Arashi gets) in one world almost made the entire manga worth it.

But starting from around the second half, where they run into most of the X cast in an AU retelling of that world… epic plotlines that bring together elements from all your worlds are all very well and good, as long as you can keep things understandable and have a simple logic to everything. This became impossible towards the end of Tsubasa. I’ll be honest, I’m still not quite sure what happened, and after about the 4th clone I didn’t really want to go back and read it all again to find out. More to the point, everyone became so MISERABLE. Granted, Kurogane and Syaoran are normally not happy go lucky, but the angst was piled on in a way that felt overdone.

I’d mentioned Tsubasa was kudzu, mostly as I felt it grew to strangle everything it touched. No work felt that touch more than xxxHOLIC. The series were always intended to be lightly connected – the two had occasional crossover chapters when Yuko’s magic was needed – but for a while it was possible to read xxxHOLIC without bothering with Tsubasa at all. And then came the revelations about Watanuki. Now, I am totally biased about this. If I had to pick my favorite post-2000 CLAMP series, xxxHOLIC would win in a walk. And Watanuki is the main reason for this. He’s their best character in years, snarky without being a jerk, angsty without being overdone, and the perfect straight man to Yuko’s shenanigans, Himawari’s cheeriness, and Doumeki’s deadpan style.

And then, right around Volume 13, it becomes impossible to read xxxHOLIC without understanding what’s going on in Tsubasa. Now, this is hardly unique to CLAMP, and is a great way to get people to buy multiple series. The problem is what it does to xxxHOLIC: the plot stops. Seriously, all forward motion for the remaining few volumes simply halts. CLAMP must have been aware of this, they certainly telegraphed it enough. Watanuki ends up not even being able to leave the confines of the shop. Himawari and Doumeki both leave offscreen, Himawari to get married to someone we never see or hear about, and things finally grind to a halt 100 years later, where… everything is still in stasis. If Tsubasa ends with a giant 50-car pileup of plots, xxxHOLIC drifts to the side of the road and fills with carbon monoxide.

Another issue with the way CLAMP’s star systems work is that they continue some of their characters’ stories after the ‘happily ever after’ of their own titles… even if you don’t want them to. Tezuka, at least, never pretended that when you saw Rock in one title and then another, it was the same Rock later in his life. But two of my favorite cute and fuzzy early CLAMP series, Campus Detectives and Man of Many Faces, both have their leads show up in minor roles… in X. Really, CLAMP, really? I went through two volumes of adorable fluff between Akira and Utako (you too will believe in the romance between a 9-year-old and 5-year-old!) only to see them in THIS plot? So I guess they lived happily ever after until their world was consumed in fire, then.

Part of maturity is in seeing that things aren’t just black and white, and that every happily ever after is followed by ‘until they died’, because such is life. And yet this is fiction, not reality. And dammit, I admit it: I liked CLAMP better when they did sugar-candy coated happy endings. They didn’t even have to be shallow: no one is accusing Card Captor Sakura or Rayearth of a lack of drama. But in getting deeper and more complicated, CLAMP has also made things far more convoluted than they needed to be, developed ideas that tended to have unforeseen and unfortunate issues if you really thought about it (hi, Angelic Layer!), and show off a disturbing lack of pacing that may also come from ‘we are famous enough so that we can be serialized whenever we put a few pages together’ (xxxHOLIC, towards the end of its run, sometimes ran for only 8-9 pages per issue).

This is not apparently going to be ending soon. Their new continuation of Legal Drug, now retitled Drug & Drop, apparently has Watanuki popping up, and also crosses with Kobato. CLAMP just likes doing this. Which is fine. I just miss the old, uncomplicated CLAMP, with simple plots in a shoujo vein. Modern CLAMP is fascinating, but that fascination can also turn into a fatal attraction.

Manga the Week of 8/1

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It’s August 1st! Or, as Diamond likes to call it, July 32nd! In other words, expect another lean week for comic shops.

Dark Horse, which has been fairly quiet as of late, comes out with not one but two new titles! Vol. 25 of the perennial classic Blade of the Immortal, which not only features snow, but also dawn. Two separate things that make for great manga. There’s also Vol. 2 of Drifters, Hirano’s attempt to follow up on Hellsing. Those watching the current anime season will be saddened that, though this manga features Oda Nobunaga, he is not a cute young girl.

Sure it came out everywhere else two weeks ago, but Diamond is above such petty things as street dates! Vertical, however, is merely content with getting you some quality Moyoco Anno manga. This one in particular is a period piece examining a young woman’s rise as an Oiran, and how that’s not really as heartwarming and empowering as it may sound. It’s fantastic reading.

Lastly, and with perfect timing, we have some X hitting shops just in time to miss the Manga Moveable Feast. Vol. 3 of the omnibus contains the original Vols. 7-9, and things get even more apocalyptic. Well, I imagine they do, things got entirely too depressing for me around this point. But more on that tomorrow…

Another small week, but it’s got some quality. What appeals to you?

Angel Para Bellum, Vol. 1

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By Kent Minami and Nozomu Tamaki. Released in Japan by Flex Comics, serialization ongoing in the online magazine Flex Comics Next. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

It has to be said, despite my ongoing joke that it succeeds because it has the word ‘vampire’ in the title, Seven Seas’ license of Dance in the Vampire Bund has proven to be one of their big successes. And as you’d expect when there is a big success, they likely decided to look around and see what else the artist had done that might pick up a similar audience in North America. After filtering out titles the author did that are too pornographic to really be licensed hre… you’re left with very little. Tamaki-san seems to specialize in various kinds of ‘adult’ work, a lot of it running in the borderline H magazines such as Takeshobo’s Vitamin. However, he also recently teamed up with an author to do an online serialization for Flex Comics, which seems to be more about action and religion that showing off the female body.

As readers who follow my site likely know, if I spend almost 200 words talking about the background to a manga rather than the manga itself, it means I’m already reaching for things I can say. But let’s get down to brass tacks. This series introduces us to Mitsuru, a young, pretty, and very emotional young man who is apparently also the key that will bring about the final apocalyptic war between heaven and hell. Protecting him are a team of angels, including Archangel Gabriel, aka Kyrie, his ‘older sister’ figure who recently disappeared, and Revy from Black Lagoon… um, sorry, I mean the Archangel Azrael. They are battling against a group of nasty demons, who want Mitsuru dead so they can bring about the war on their own terms.

The religious terms come thick and fast in this series, and may grow to be more relevant later, but honestly the war in heaven is really just a plot hook on which hangs a bunch of action and things blowing up. Gabriel/Kyrie can call down heavenly fire, the various demons can turn into slavering Cthulhu-like horrors, and of course everyone can fire guns. There’s even a few sequences of roof hopping. As for the other, non-action type of fan service, Gabriel and Azrael are seen nude often (especially Azrael, who walks around topless most of the time) and we are told they are androgynous and also have male members. It’s all just for show, of course – Mitsuru is far too innocent to bother thinking of taking advantage of anything, and spends most of this volume in a constant state of trauma in any case.

There were one or two moments in this manga I felt worked pretty well – the description of how humans let angels or demons possess them, and seeing it work on a sweet young thing at a coffee shop was well-handled and rather chilling. For the most part, though, I don’t think the first volume of this series really cohered all that well. There was a lot of theoretical plot tossed around – and we meet Uriel, a third Archangel who is (of course) in the body of a little girl – but for the most part it can be summed up as ‘Mitsuru gets menaced, then rescued, then lots of things blow up, get shot, or catch fire’. Hopefully it will gain more depth later on.