I have no problem with Clamp. I know there are many people out there who hate them as well as many people who love everything they do, but i like to consider myself in the category of the indifferent. If Clamp creates something good, I’ll praise them for it and if it’s the lather I just put them in the doghouse. It’s simple for me like that. This time around, I’ve finished off the manga Clover and although it was good at times, it most definitely had its fault.
The story is about a girl named Sue who got categorized as a “four leaf clover”, which from a scale of one to four leaves, makes her super powerful and very unique. With the help of some black-ops agent who got pulled out of retirement, he helps Sue get to a unknown location that only Sue knows of. The style this manga tries to take is different than what you would see in most. It doesn’t flow like in the many panels of the average manga, but instead focuses only on selected “stills” as it tries to tell its story in the most visually enticing way.
In terms of the art itself, you can instantly tell it has some typical Clamp qualities, but it still looks relatively original. The character designs are very nice, I particularly like Sue and the cool wings she sometimes has. Ora also had some great looking hair and outfits and the use of negative space and a bunch of other art term stuff throughout the series was also well thought, so I’ll give Clamp some points for that. Although all the choices that were made to make Clover so pretty, made it difficult to follow through with its story. at least it succeeds at its original intentions of being beautiful.
To elaborate more about the last paragraph, the way this manga presents itself is no doubt pretty, but for the first volume it makes it difficult to really get into the story as you try and grasp the feel that the author is trying to make. By volume two and three, it works well, but by volume four it was just all over the place. I think the plot also ties in to this all because I would definitely say volume two and three had the best parts of this story because they were simple in concept, but also very intriguing. Volume four was trying to introduce tons of new things, change the point of view and in all just make everything about Clover much more complicated. The ending didn’t bring much conclusion either, but I’ve heard it was because two more volumes were planned but never made to finish the story.
I managed to loan the new omnibus edition of this manga from my library, which is probably for the best because Clover is not really worth the buy. Just looking at the quality of the omnibus edition, the bind is most definitely not very sturdy and will cause a lot of ugly creases in it after one read, but the extra pages of full colour images were nice in the least I’ll admit. Looking at just the story, it was not very good anf it makes for just a quick read (you can easily finish all four volume sin under an hour) that when you’ll be done, you probably won’t think much back on. Clover should only be read by those who love Clamp and know they’ll enjoy it no matter what.
