Friday, March 4, 2011

Never heard of CLAMP? Crawl out of your Hole and visit a Book store!

One of my favorite groups of manga artists are CLAMP. If you like manga and have never heard of CLAMP then you need to crawl out of the hole you live in and make your way to the nearest bookstore! CLAMP is composed of 4 women who have been creating manga since the 80s. One of the things that make CLAMP an amazing group is their diversity.  Romance, Action, Violence. Their work has it all. One of my favorite works by them is a series called X/1999 which is currently on hold and has been for several years.

The series is about a battle to determine if man will continue to dominate the earth. The two apposing forces represent the Earth (the Dragons of Earth) and Heaven (the Dragons of Heaven). One force fights on behalf of the Earth which has been damaged by mankind’s harmful ways; they seek to destroy all of humanity to save the earth. The other group fights on behalf of Heaven and seek to save mankind. There are a lot of details that go into the story but really you should check out a volume yourself. Because of the graphic nature of the story and the direction it was headed, their publishers asked them to change the story. In X, one of the ways that the Dragons of Earth fight is to defile places and cause massive earthquakes which kill a lot of people. At the time this series was running, there were several large earthquakes in Japan and lots of casualties which added to the request that the story move in another direction.
 To my knowledge the series is still on hiatus (pretty sure it’s been like 4+years…) Still a good read even if it stops suddenly. Art work is beautiful and it has an array of interesting and well developed characters. One of my favorites so check it out! I had intended to talk about CLAMP but got stuck on X…Maybe I will touch on some of their other great works another time…

9 comments:

  1. ah yes, CLAMP, the group of 4 women (I think) responsible of such masterpieces as Tsubasa, Sakura, xxXHolic... their art style is truly beautiful

    ReplyDelete
  2. Checking X out now!!
    nice blog!!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ive never heard of CLAMP, no! Maybe i will have to get over to my book store and get them, thanks for the great info!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I thought the ending for X/1999 was in the anime? Is that an unofficial ending? I haven't seen it yet and only just started the manga.

    ReplyDelete
  5. such a great series and fine art,i do digg it

    ReplyDelete
  6. I love manga and anime, Need to go look CLAMP up!

    ReplyDelete
  7. that last picture was crazy

    ReplyDelete
  8. I shall add a book of theirs to my next book binge

    ReplyDelete