This page was the creation of Mene
In my opinion CLAMP is one of the greatest manga authors that has been translated into French and English. I would even venture to call them literature. Their stories tend to be dark, very involved and strung out, and have plot twists that could never be seen beforehand. The writting is almost like poetry in that there is almost never unessary dialogue, or pictures. Everything is important. For example in Tokyo Babylon 4 there is a picture that on first glance seems only to be some shadowed people talking, but on closer inspection it can be seen that one of those people is really Seishiro's hawk watching it all. The stories can be so detailed that it may happen, like in X, that only two days have elapsed since the series started, but you find yourself on graphic novel 7. I usually am not a fan of depressing works, but CLAMP does it so well that it is still fascinating to read and feels as if it was needed.
The artistry in CLAMP's works are equally as powerful. The people are all incredibly stylized, stick thin, sharp faces, large feet and uncopiable eyes that reflect every emotion that passes through the character's mind. If people could be that scrawny then CLAMP's women are fairy realistic. Most of the women are not buxom and have slightly hunched shoulders, because they are so thin. The men are not quite so real looking. They remind me of romance novel hereos, with their narrow hips and super broad shoulders. If they were alive I think they would keel over with the exceptiong of Ashura.
CLAMP's style has undergone an interesting transformation. If their earlier works, such as RG Veda are observed, they look much more streamline than the more distinctive style of their later pieces. The figures are still the same, except that the men have really big pectral muscles, but the eyes lack the depth and blackness that helps give them their expression. The drawings on a whole are much lighter and there are less of those distinctive CLAMP two page=one picture shots that are so powerful. This is not to say that RG Veda is not as good a work as their later ones, at one point a character dies, who the reader has only met for thirty pages, and it invokes the same emotions that would be found if they killed off a character after nine volumes. CLAMP's style then changed to pictures like in X and Tokyo Babylon. They are very distinctive with small figures on a huge black piece of paper with nothing else in the picture but a shadow. They tend to be many hues of dark grey, with many full page shots and detailed backgrounds. All the unimportant people tend to be in shadow. Clover is totally different than all of the above. It still has many full page shots, but the figures tend to be miniscule on the page. Possibly just a square of face, or a hand. There is much white space in these pictures and the most minimalist amount of text needed. The lines of the figures are softer, the noses bigger and the eyes more cloudy. It is by far their most powerful, though personally I prefere to look at those pictures in the Tokyo Babylon era.
Well that is all I have to say about CLAMP, except for I forgot to mention that the RG Veda style is very similar to that of Yu Watase...
