Category: Magical Girl

Manga of the Month: Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card

Leave a comment

Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card by CLAMP

The first Cardcaptor Sakura manga debuted in 1996 and quickly became a high bar in the magical girl genre which is still beloved all these years later.

Despite CLAMP’s evolving art style, the current of which is much more clean and simplified, they were able to return to an earlier form embracing the chibi faces, asides, screentones, and many other staples of their 90s manga which allows this new Cardcaptor Sakura story to feel seamless. The only thing that points to a different era is a more decompressed storytelling as Clear Card surpasses the length of the original CCS stories.

In Clear Card, Sakura is making her middle school debut! As the school year opens, Syaoran returns from Hong Kong to join Sakura and their friends. Sakura is excited by all the new possibilities of the future, but soon she is having strange dreams of a cloaked figure and the Clow Cards mysteriously turn clear.

It probably goes without saying, but you should definitely read the original CCS to follow along with Clear Card. Although there are new characters and a lot of new developments, the core cast and their relationships are still at the center of this story. I don’t think I would have been quite so moved by seeing Sakura and Syaoran meet again without knowing the history.

As the series progresses and they start to unravel why the Clow Cards have evolved, this becomes a story about adolescence. Sakura is growing and changing, her magic powers are as well, and the path ahead is one of her own making.

CLAMP came back to one of their iconic series after two decades away and it feels perfectly aligned.

-Kate

Hugtto! PreCure: More is Less? Maybe?

Leave a comment


Warning: Spoilers for Hugtto! PreCure

hisui_icon_4040_round Truth be told I’m actually going to try to keep spoilers about Hugtto! PreCure to a minimum. The thing is I’m going to be talking about the show as a whole including the ending so spoilers are inevitable but I will try to leave some details as vague as possible because I know the length of the PreCure franchise tends to ward off all but the hardcore. At the same time, the number of very strong PreCure entries has grown to the point where people are getting more interested in the series like they have with Gundam or Jojo’s. So I have a feeling more people are going to read this out of general curiosity than the number of people who have finished the series. For them, I want to leave some sense of discovery if this makes them seek out Hugtto!

Also leaving somethings deliberately vague is thematically appropriate for this article.

Continue reading →

Manga of the Month: Again!!

3 Comments

Again!! by Mitsuro Kubo

hisui_icon_4040_round I always wonder how much those stickers that say “From the artist who brought you Title X” help sales. Did “From the Author of Fruits Basket” help Yen Press with the sales of Twinkle Stars? Fruits Basket was one of most popular manga back in the day whereas I never hear anyone talking about Twinkle Stars. Now you can’t make a statement like mentioning a previous title will boost the sales of a new title by a fixed 46% because there are too many factors. Did the artist have one title with mass appeal that caught on but their other works are too esoteric? Will their initial audience go along with an artist if they go with a radically different direction? Are the readers burnt out on the formula of the artist’s last title? Was the initial success just a product of right time right place? Most of the time you would be foolish not to remind people of some earlier successes if you have the chance. It is a low effort way to possibly greatly increase your sales. The real question is how much is that boost with any particular title.

I mostly bring this up because I have at last one example of it working. When I went to the library I was a manga I had not heard of before. When I looked to see what it is about I saw a sticker that said, “story and art by Mitsurou Kubo the co-creator of Yuri!!! on ICE.” Now Sayo Yamamoto clearly shaped a good deal of what that anime would be but any anime is a collaborative work. The thing is Mitsurou Kubo has credits for her work on the original concept, the character designs, character names, insert song lyrics, and screenplay of all 12 episodes. She pretty much worked on everything that people liked about that show other than the animation. The sticker might as well have said, “may contain everything you liked from that ice skating show.”

So I had to see what this series is about. We go from the world of professional ice skating to time traveling oendan. You can’t say that the woman just has one story to tell with slight variations.

Continue reading →