CLAMP Official Artbooks: COLOR Kuro & COLOR Shiro Review

Reviewing books can be complicated when dealing with different publishers, and they don’t come any more complicated than dealing with the work of a group of people who have been creating manga for over 35 years among different companies in their homeland, leading to the situation that two different collections of their art are being released by two different companies at the same time.

Nevertheless, that is the legacy of CLAMP, the all-women manga collective whose official debut, RG Veda, began in 1989, and who are still working to this day, having recently revived xxxHOLiC: Rei from a long hiatus (still waiting for that X hiatus to be lifted after 20 years though). These artbooks, COLOR Kuro (black) and COLOR Shiro (white), were originally released as part of a CLAMP art exhibition held last year, and have managed to cross over into an official English-language release – not that there’s much language to translate as the books are mostly pictures, but we will get to that later.

Of course, there have been plenty of artbooks released on the work of CLAMP before. Pretty much every title they have made has had at least one, and there are also larger collections such as 2009’s All About CLAMP from Kadokawa Shoten which features multiple extras, most notably the never released remaining chapters of X that were recently re-released in Japan as Volume 18.5. However, none of these books have been translated into English, so these two COLOR books are a first.

Kuro is released by Yen Press who recently gave us a new edition of early CLAMP title Tokyo Babylon, as well as Kobato when it first debuted. Shiro comes from Kodansha, who have gone to town with multiple special releases of CLAMP favourites like Cardcaptor Sakura and Magic Knight Rayearth. They also printed xxxHOLiC but we have yet to hear news about them releasing the new xxxHOLiC: Rei manga.

Obviously the two books are very similar. Both are rated Teen, with Yen saying part of the reason for this is nudity. Both cost around £40, are sized A4, are 144 pages long, and are printed on high-quality glossy paper. Each book ends with brief descriptions of where each artwork made their debut appearance, and both display work from just about every series in the CLAMP canon, with the only works not appearing being the recently revived xxxHOLiC: Rei and the sadly neglected never-translated one-shot Murikuri. As a result, if you only buy one of these books, you will still get to see art from (almost) every CLAMP title, big and small. No individual series is hogged by any particular artbook.

Then we get to the differences. For starters, no single piece of art appears in both books, so both Shiro and Kuro are totally different works. In Kuro, there is a brief translation note on one of the pictures, namely one of Seishiro from X where it translates some graffiti from Japanese into English. Shiro’s final page includes two pieces of art from last year’s CLAMP exhibit, one of Sakura in the modern Clear Card era, and another of Ashura from RG Veda. Given that above one picture is the word “Shiro” and another “Kuro”, I don’t understand why one book had to have both images when it would make more sense to split them up.

As for the art itself, well it’s hard to say something that hasn’t been said already about CLAMP’s art. For many, it’s the art that makes their work stand out, and in these two books you get to see the wide variety of work they have done, ranging from the fantasy themes of series like Rayearth to the sci-fi setting of Clover, and from the wild fashions seen in Tokyo Babylon to the slightly more risqué adventures of Miyuki-chan in Wonderland, which is why I believe these books have a Teen rating (these include a bath scene and one where Miyuki-chan’s school uniform is so wet you can see her bra underneath).

One advantage of having these books printed in the way they are is that you are able to get a much more detailed look at these images, and thus not just appreciate the quality of the work that has gone into them, but also little details you might have missed before, when previously you might have only seen these pictures in black-and-white in a printed manga, or in a less-good resolution computer image. It is a joy to get in close with so many illustrations and witness the different techniques, motifs and range of characters and styles CLAMP have used in their long career.

Aside from the aforementioned note on the Seishiro picture in Kuro, the only major work of translation is in the “First Appearance” section, giving brief notes about where each artwork first debuted. As a result, there was not that much work for Yen’s Amanda Healy and Kodansa’s Greg Moore to do, although Moore is also Shiro’s editor whereas Jacquelyn Li does this for Kuro. The covers of the books were created in Japan by Miyuki Yamaguchi, aka Veia, and the deceptively simple use of the word “COLOR” to put images in is delightful.

I would not say both books are perfect: the adding of a note on top of an image in Kiro when it could go in the “First Appearance” pages is a little annoying; the use of two original images from the CLAMP exhibit in Shiro rather than splitting them up seems unfair; and at £40 each both books are expensive, although the quality of each book explains why the prices are such. Still, as a CLAMP fan they are both a joy to own and it is still a joy to look back at their work after all these years and still admire the high standard.

Our review copy of Kuro was supplied by Yen Press and our review copy of Shiro from Kodansha was supplied by Diamond Book Distributors UK.