Monday, February 16, 2009

Clover: Manga for People Who Don't Like Manga


Not only am I late with this installment of ‘Manga for People Who Don’t like Manga,’ but I forgot that I was going to do a piece on CLAMP. I choose CLAMP because I wanted to challenge myself. Not that I don’t like CLAMP, I’m actually a huge fan. CLAMP is a four woman super-group who have produced dozens of different manga titles. The make-up of the group (one writer, three different artists) allows them to play with multiple genres and styles. Sometimes the stories will even intersect and influence each other. For American superhero fans, imagine if all of the titles from Marvel or DC were created by four people, and you have CLAMP in miniature.

The challenging part of focusing on them for this series is that CLAMP’s works embody practically every cliché and staple of every genre they use. And for most anime fans, we love it. We’re like goldfish, and CLAMP’s series are the fish food: we forget that we’ve already eaten this stuff before, we’ll just keep gulping it down as long as you feed it to us.

They’ve done giant robots, magical girls, harem sex comedies, a tournament style fighting series, school girl romance, apocalyptic fantasy, and everything else in between. The problem is that while everything is nice and familiar to anime fans, what to recommend to non-manga readers?

I have a few suggestions. These aren’t even my favorite CLAMP titles, but even non-manga readers should be able to get into them.

First up, Clover. Clover ran in ‘Amie’ magazine in Japan and was released in four volumes before the magazine went under. Even though it’s unfinished, I kind of like it in its incompleteness. There may be holes in the story, but at least Clover has atmosphere to spare.

Suu is a young girl with the ability to control machines. In the dystrophic world she lives in, children like her are controlled by the government and labeled ‘Clovers.’ One day, a retired soldier named Kazuhiko is asked to take her to ‘Fairy Park.’ Why does she want to go to an old amusement park? And why does Kazuhiko have to be the one who takes her there?

Like I mentioned before, CLAMP’s art differs widely from series to series, but the art in Clover is special. Not only does it not look like nothing they’ve done before (or since), it doesn’t look like anything else out there. The pages are sparse, often with about one to three panels on a page. Sometimes those panels will show things, other times they’ll just hold a speech bubble, or sometimes nothing at all.

But what you do see is beautiful. Clover has an aesthetic that draws as much from Victorian England as steam-punk. The character designs are graceful, though may take some getting used to (Kazuhiko is burdened with a disproportional hip to shoulder ratio, an affliction that many CLAMP men have).

CLAMP sometimes seem like savvy marketers than artists. Many of their series have spawned anime series and oodles of merchandise, but Clover really doesn’t fit that mold. It’s just this arty, angsty little series that could use more love. It’s kind of hard to track down copies that Tokyopop published, but Dark Horse is supposed to be coming out with an omnibus edition of all four volumes later this year. If you want to see sequential art down in a different way, than keep your eyes open for it.

Since CLAMP has such a huge catalogue, I was going to do more than one series for this article, but now I think I’ll save it for another time. Next week however, I will continue on this theme of suggesting a series from well-loved manga-ka, only instead of CLAMP I’m going to try and sell you on my favorite Rumiko Takahashi title.

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