When I was a kid, there were three cartoons that really got me drawn in and made me not want to miss any episodes. The first was Pokemon, the behemoth of advertising for the games, the king of the status quo. The second was Digimon, in particular Digimon Adventure, the first series.
The final one was Cardcaptors, the dub of a show called Cardcaptor Sakura in Japan, about a young girl who finds, and accidentally releases into the world, a set of magical cards known as Clow cards. I really loved the characters, and the creative uses of the cards, and the mix of action, friendship, intrigue and everyday life that made up it. But, like all good things, it came to an end. I later managed to pick up some videos of it, though those became useless when the VHS player for my TV died, so it wasn't until my family got broadband internet that I actually tried searching for it again. Did it hold up?
In a word, no. Not really. There wasn't anything particularly bad, this isn't like "4Kids dub of One Piece" levels of bad, it was just not great. The voice acting was not great, the scripts weren't great, the desperate attempts to pretend that the whole thing wasn't in Japan was...fairly normal for this kind of thing actually, but still not great.* It was better than it could have been (one version of the dub spliced up the first set of episodes so that Li got a bigger part. The first few episodes, the ones that actually set up the story, are relegated to flashback. This was done since boys, of course, can't relate to girls. Not like Sakura was one of my childhood idols or anything.), but I still wouldn't seek it out, even back all those years ago when I was just taking my first steps onto youtube.
Then I discovered this other link in the sidebar to a show named "Cardcaptor Sakura".
CCS was the first subbed anime I ever watched, and directly lead me to tracking down the manga version. I became a huge fan of the group CLAMP (although less so now, for various reasons), and so I thought that it would a good idea to look at some of their works through the ages. So this month is going to be CLAMP month, where I look at some select works from their very, very, very extensive catalogue.
So Who Is This CLAMP anyway?
CLAMP is the collective name for a group of female manga artists who started off as a dojinshi (self published) group named Clamp Cluster mainly doing fan works of other series. Eventually, however, they decided to do original work, and began producing a work simply known as Clamp. Their first published work, RG Veda, was published in a magazine called Wings in 1989, although by this point their numbers had dropped from eleven to seven (which later dropped down to just four). From there, they produced a lot of series. Since 1989, they have released, to date, 19 finished works, along with four ongoing or halted projects, and that's not including the short stories they've done that have never been put into a book, or side projects such as the character designs for Code Geass. While I'm not going to do a full review on all of them, I will be taking a short look at as many as I can.**
*"great" stopped looking like a word a while ago, I'm going to stop saying it now.
** I know I've claimed that I would be updating often before, but this time I mean it, since I've worked out how to schedule blog posts to automatically post themselves so that I don't need to remember.***
*** As I say this, this post didn't update itself on time. Well, great.
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