It’s been quite a while since I last decided to shine a spotlight on someone. Considering how much I enjoy the works of the Clamp collective as well as having a discussion with someone recently how about intermittingly they release manga these days, I thought it worth shining a spotlight on the spectacular Clamp collective.
Interestingly, the Clamp collective initially began as a doujinshi group in the mid-1980s, producing doujinshi versions of Captain Tsubasa and Saint Seiya. The group originally consisted of eleven women and they began to create an original doujinshi work called RG Veda. They were eventually approached by an editor for a manga magazine called Wings who wished for Clamp to work for them. After a rocky start to their professional career, RG Veda ultimately proved to be a successful series and allowed Clamp to break into the industry.
After RG Veda, Clamp quickly began work on other series such as Man of Many Faces, Tokyo Babylon, X/1999 etc. Despite their success, the collective quickly began to hemorrhage members, first down to seven before eventually ending up with only four members by 1993, these being Nanase Ohkawa, Mokona, Tsubaki Nekoi and Satsuki Igarashi who have remained as members of Clamp ever since.
Since then, they have released a wide variety of highly acclaimed series such as Cardcaptor Sakura, Chobits, xxxHolic amongst many others. It’s also worth noting that, beyond adaptations of their works, they’ve collaborated with studios to produce some anime series. Notable examples of this would be providing the character designs for Code Geass, the characters designs and story for Blood-C as well as working with Netflix and WIT Studio to produce an anime based on the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.
As for why I admire their works, the first thing I have to bring up is their artwork. Beyond the elegant character designs that they’re known for, which I do love, I also adore their expert use of manga panels. I’ve always been a huge fan of the way many manga implement their panels and Clamp do not disappoint when it comes to this. Similarly to the Year 24 Group, many of Clamp’s works implement angular panels, sometimes removing borders to allow panels to flow into one another and incredible use of negative spacing.
Beyond that, I also love the variety of stories that they choose to tell. Many of their manga feel quite distinct from each other and cover a wide variety of themes and genres. Of course, this doesn’t always work out such as when I read Duklyon: Clamp School Defenders and found the stories and characters to be unbelievably bad. However, I’m much happier to see some experimentation on their part than to be fed the same story again and again and love many of their other series such as Cardcaptor Sakura, Chobits, Angelic Layer etc.
I have great admiration for the Clamp collective and strongly recommend manga fans to seek out their works. Let me know your thoughts on this spotlight on the spectacular Clamp collective, which have been your favourite and least favourite manga from them, what you think of their artwork and panel techniques and any additional information you might have on the topic.
Hopefully you have found this article interesting and informative and, if you wish to seek any of the works I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk and amazon.com for all of your needs!