About Heroes

This Review was Submitted by Thomas Pfeiffer

Story & Art: CLAMP
Publisher: Del Rey

Watanuki’s a normal teenaged high school kid, well except for the fact that he’s suffering from the Ichigo epidemic of seeing ghosts and ghoulies, who accidentally stumbles into a mystic shop run by an arrogant, crazy lush named Yuko, the space-time witch. Yuko’s specialty just so happens to be in fixing people’s “problems” in exchange for something equally important. For Watanuki that happens to be his “ghost-seeing” problem in exchange for Watanuki becoming the indentured servant for the witch. Watanuki’s day to day adventures include cooking, cleaning, shopping, acquiring the latest alcoholic beverage Yuko has the taste for at the time, and catching glimpses of other patrons of the shop and their tragic downfalls. Of course this is an occult shop so it’s not as hum-drum as it sounds, ordinary chores can quickly brush elbows with the supernatural.

Going into this manga I had no idea what to expect. I knew that it crossed over into “Tsubasa Chronicles” another CLAMP work being published at the same time, so I was intrigued, I heard great things about Tsubasa and its “crossovers” and of course been a CLAMP fan ever since those three girls went off to magical RPG land and started killing off princesses. Mostly I was excited about possibly seeing some crossovers from CLAMP series in XXXholic, but alas none (unless of course you count Tsubasa, and there is a drunk black Mokona). The premise for the manga that you get from reading the first couple of volumes sounds great. Problematic people coming into a mystical shop for help with their problems or addictions and the space-time witch which tries to help them, often ending in a sorrowful, or horror-filled climax for the individuals when they won’t listen to Yuko’s advice. It seems that’s where the ol’ CLAMP gals got the title (“XXXholic” as in “(insert addiction here)-holic”) Brilliant premise! But soon the manga turns into random stories about Watanuki, his exorcist rival, and the girl next door he’s in love with and the shenanigans they get into with japanese folk tales and mythology. It sort of turns into a poor man’s Urusei Yatsura, random stories involving the supernatural, but unlike Urusei Yatsura, no zany, over-the-top humor. The stories seem to try too hard to include fables and mythology without actually having a reason to giving you that “what was the point?” feeling. It feels like the majority of the stories are “filler” stories in an anime series that you end up hoping the next chapter will actually continue on with the plot. Just so you know after Volume 3 they really don’t, at least not often enough. In fact the only reason I continued reading this manga was to find out if it would ever go back to that intriguing premise that it led you into thinking this manga was about.

Of course the artwork is phenomenal. I honestly have to say that this is my favorite CLAMP artwork, and I’m a huge CLAMP fan. It’s drastically different than any of their other stuff. It still keeps with CLAMP’s way of doing malnourished, anorexic men, bubbly cute females and detailed hair, jewelry, etc. but it seems to have a much more clean line feel with much more simplified character designs (most of the male characters wear a school suit which transfers into CLAMP’s artwork as a pitch black body suit with angles). It might appear to be a very lazy style but the lines are so precise and technical every page is a work of art. Also the lack of details in the characters makes the read much more enjoyable and easy for to see character movements and depth.

All in all XXXHolic is a manga having an identity crisis. Tons of different ideas and premises leaving the reader confused on what kind of story the manga’s actually attempting to be telling. Pick up the first three volumes, if you liked the stories of Watanuki & Co. and their zany adventures with the supernatural, keep reading, that’s the plot point that CLAMP for the majority of the time runs with. If not stop there and just think of this manga as a really good idea wasted. B-