Clover

Style over substance is the best way to describe this series. Stylistically this manga was innovative and artistic - lots of song lyrics positioned to match the mood of the scene, lots of negative space and white backgrounds that created a bleak and somber atmosphere in your mind while reading, and lots of chapters that are 1 or 2 pages long. All of that is fine and I do have an appreciation for serious/quirky series (I am an Utena fan after all). What turned me off was that the ENTIRE manga was like this - all 4 volumes - with heavy style but very little character, plot,setting, and art development. I don't like finishing a manga that was meant to be heavily emotional and not caring about anything or anybody. CLAMP was probably more concerned with making a graphic poem instead of a graphic novel. Clover had an abstract, free-flowing feel to it - like a poem - instead of a start-to-finish story. Time-skips, 1 page chapters, and more song lyrics than actual dialogue.... this was definitely not a conventional story. Some would argue if the series is even finished because the ending was left very open....but you could say that about the whole series, so who knows. The foundation and potential was there to make this an amazing series. The set up being in a futuristic, dystopian sci-fi world was cool, the Clover Leaf Project idea was cool, all the pretty people with super powers was cool - but all of this was underdeveloped. The art however - when there actually was some - was very pretty and CLAMP-like. One example is Suu, the main character who is supposed to be very powerful and the most dangerous person in the world. Okay. That 'danger' was never shown or elaborated on and I guess as the reader you are supposed to take CLAMP's word for it. This is how it was for the whole story. How am I to get emotionally invested in a story when there's no initial construction for the characters, plot, and setting? You can't, and I didn't. Fans of CLAMP will enjoy this series obvious. I would recommend that this NOT be your first CLAMP series because it's so different from their other work and it may turn you off from seeking their other titles. This wasn't a terrible series.... it's different and I did like it stylistically, I just wish there was a lot more substance.

Hm, where should I start with this review? I remember back in my early days on the Internet, I remember seeing pictures of Sue everywhere. I recognized the art as CLAMP but I wasn’t aware she was from a manga series until I actually started to read about CLAMP. I longed for the day to read it because I really loved their ideas for stories and I wanted to explore what other worlds they have created. And, honestly, I’m not quite sure what I read. The setting takes place in a retro like world that has steampunk. I suppose that’s interesting in itself – I’m notthat interested in steampunk but hey, it’s different so why not? What’s the worst thing that could happen? Well… I got the basic plot down – Kazuhiko, an agent, was pulled from retirement to escort Sue to somewhere that she wanted to go. Alright, I get that. The two start getting to know each other over the course of the story and, at the end, Kazuhiko realized the connection between Sue and Ora, his dead girlfriend…. except not really? There’s also something about a guy trying to kill him (and gets off on the sadism) and chasing the two down only to give up after the first fight between them. Er. There are other characters in the story as well – a comrade named Gingetsu who’s all mysterious and cool (and always has a visor on for whatever reason that’s not entirely clear), and a guy named Ran who’s experienced in computers and has a special sort of power. As you can see, the cast is kinda small if you don’t really consider the elder Wizards, or Generals, or any of the random characters that pop up here and there. To be honest, I’m not sure if this particular story would work as a manga simply because there’s a song that keeps showing up during the course of the manga – the song Sue and Ora wrote together. It’s assumed that Ora has, or had, a really pretty voice that we’re supposed to imagine. I feel something like that, if you’re going to include a singer, visuals and sound would help carry the story more. I suppose the simple message of CLOVER is that you have to make certain sacrifices to be happy or you have to take the first step towards that happiness. The message is fine, but it felt that it got lost in its own imagery. After a while, I was wondering what we’re supposed to be doing. The art, as usual, is gorgeous in its CLAMP glory but the writing… It may have gotten lost for the sake of trying to be deep. It was hard to follow the story simply because a character could be talking about how hard it would be to get happiness again or if we ever attained it in the first place on minute and the next minute, we’re in the middle of a battle. Okay, but what just happened with the battle??? And that’s just the main story. It felt really rushed simply because, again, it wasn’t really clear what’s going on. Words are pretty but manga is also a visual medium – show, don’t just tell. Though, if we took out maybe a good chunk of the monologues, maybe it’d be easier to understand what’s going on. Oh yeah, and Kazuhiko apparently has an arm gun as a super weapon because, why the hell not? Included are side stories about how Ora and Sue met as well as a backstory to Ran and Gingetsu’s relationship. These side stories go deeper into the Clover Leaf Project. From what I can understand, the Clover Leaf Project started because people, particularly children, are developing psychic or magical abilities. Depending how high their level is, that’s how they rate them. For example, Ora was a one-leaf because her only power is predicting her own death (which was never explained who killed her or why). One-leaf is considered the weakest and the least threatening to the government. However, as the leaves go up, it becomes evident that the person is more powerful. In Ran’s short story, it’s revealed that Gingetsu is a two-leaf and Ran was imprisoned (along with his twin) because he’s a three-leaf. Sue is considered a four-leaf which is why she was completely sealed off from the world. Ran and his twin are considered too powerful even against the five most powerful generals, or again, wizards. Forget Sue. She could destroy them all with little effort. Apparently, the lower level leaves aren’t aware of the more powerful Clovers (in terms of who they are) but the higher powers can sense the lower levels. Interesting but there wasn’t much to it. In Ora’s short story, Ora and Sue interact over the phone. Sue didn’t realize she was actually an one-leaf until Ora told her and yet Sue was able to pick up her voice. But in Ran’s short story, Sue keeps interjecting with advice to Ran and the twin even though she knows they can’t hear her. I feel a little torn about the short stories. On one hand, it’s really interesting to see how Ora actually was and what happened to her when she died. Not only that, it explained the connection between Sue and Ora – and why Sue chose Kazuhiko to escort her to Fairy Park. Ran’s story was interesting and it showed what happened to him and how he met Gingetsu. On the other hand, were they really necessary? It shed some light but in the end, it doesn’t make the story any less confusing and still not clear what exactly its intentions are. Don’t get me wrong – I really wanted to like CLOVER a lot, especially the connections between Sue, Ora, and Kazuhiko but it fell apart and it left me more confused than when I first started to read it. I suppose I can’t really recommend it to anyone if you’re looking for a concise story but it also feels lost in its own meaning to where it’s hard to really analyze where they really wanted to go with this. I’m probably making it sound that it wants to be deeper than it actually is but the thing about it is – I’m sure it is! It’s hard to analyze it when they throw words at me and expect me to go along with it or to try to understand what they’re going for it. It seems the original meaning is somewhere in there (happiness, the costs, what it means) but it tripped and it refuses to get up. There’s a lot of talk but there’s really not enough meaning for the message to get through. Perhaps another reader can gather its meaning than I can – my problem mostly stems from the fact that I want to analyze everything and not just one thing. And the problem with CLOVER is simply – for a simple escorting story, it talks a lot but it doesn’t really mean anything.

Clover is one of the worst manga i've read (i've read more manga than my lists say, cause i don't remember what they're called), its practically got no story cause theres a guy trying to get a girl to this one place only she knows of, but in the end both of them get sent back to their starting points and the girl starts thinking about other people like her and how they survived. to add on, there would be pages covered in black with some cursive on it (presumably the lyrics of a song) that just distracted from the story and made the mangaeven harder to read. and the pages that do have stuff on them are about 95% empy space that has nothing on it and makes it even harder to read. all in all, i wouldn't recommend it.

If you've been an anime fan for a long time, there's a good chance that you've probably at least heard of CLAMP at some point. Many of their manga are beloved and famous throughout the world, from the kid-friendly magical girl manga CardCaptor Sakura, to the epic old-school isekai Magic Knight Rayearth. Nowadays, they're mostly known for Tsubasa Chronicle and XxxHolic, but they recently started writing a sequel to CardCaptor Sakura called Clear Card, so they're still around. But another thing diehard fans know about CLAMP is their...unfortunate history of starting new manga and then putting them on indefinite hiatus, the most egregious of thembeing the X manga, which ended on a massive cliffhanger and never went beyond that. Putting manga on hiatus seems to be a trend for them, whether it's because the original magazines they ran in shut down, or due to lack of ideas, or other factors, CLAMP have a bunch of manga that are in dire need of continuations or conclusions. Clover is one of those manga, and many say it's their most experimental work. Having bought and read it long ago, and re-reading it now, I'm inclined to agree, and this manga really deserves to have its story finished. In a dystopian, cyberpunk world, Kazuhiko is a young but wounded and retired black ops agent. But he suddenly gets called back in by his company for a new job that supposedly only he can do: A young woman, Sue, is requesting to be taken to an old, abandoned amusement park for some reason. The thing is, Sue is a Four-Leaf Clover, the strongest and most dangerous psychic human in the world, whose technology-manipulating powers are apparently so devastating, the powers that be have kept her in confinement, knowing that they wouldn't be able to stand a chance against someone like her. Thus, she's a top military secret. Kazuhiko has to take her there, but people from his past and other countries' armies have no intention of letting him complete his duty. There's no denying that CLAMP's artwork has always been gorgeous and lushly detailed, but here its on an entirely different level. You'll notice that the pages don't have a lot of panels, instead using a lot of white and black space, completely empty. Many of these artistic choices are used to convey a character's mental state or to experiment with panel layouts, and I think it works here. Very few panels take up the pages, and are instead arranged like collages or puzzles. Of course, CLAMP's trademark detailed art combined with the intense cyberpunk world, heavy machinery and intricate technological marvels, makes the dystopian setting really stand out in its harshness and wonder. In a way, the setting combined with CLAMP's artwork and the way the pages and panels are arranged make it almost haunting, and I wonder if that was intentional on CLAMP's part. I hope it is, because this manga has a great sense of atmosphere. But you can't have a setting and a story without characters, right? I liked the whole ensemble, even if they don't necessarily receive a whole lot of development, and none of them fall into any particular tropey archetypes, like the moe girl or the badass soldier. Sue and Kazuhiko are those two things, but CLAMP is careful to give them more subtle nuances to their characterization, along with everyone else, oftentimes letting the art and story speak to what they're like, through gestures and conversations, without the need to drop a bunch of exposition. All of them have a variety of engaging personalities, and it's clear that CLAMP wanted to do more with them but didn't get the chance to. Why? We'll get to that further down. The story itself isn't much to write home about. The manga consists of four volumes, with the first two showing Kazuhiko and Sue on their journey, and the other two being flashbacks that take place before then. The manga doesn't like to go into much detail about what it's world is like or why certain things are happening, letting the readers interpret things for themselves, but it also tackles themes of loneliness, love, what it means to be alone, and whether it's right to consider people to be dangerous because of their powers. But it's not without its bumps in the road. For one, the story doesn't have a conclusion, so there's a lot of plot threads left unresolved, such as what the deal is with that Bols guy who dismembered Kazuhiko's arm, or who killed Kazuhiko's girlfriend. Plus, there's a significant continuity error: Kazuhiko's girlfriend, Ora, is revealed to be a One-Leaf Clover, but she has a tattoo of a four leaf clover, which goes against the series' established rules. It's clear that the manga has much more story to tell. According to CLAMP, while Clover has four volumes out, they intended for it to be six volumes long. Unfortunately, Clover was put on indefinite hiatus, and the reason for that mainly has to do with bad timing. The original magazine it was serialized in, Amie, shut down in 1999. Most manga get moved to other magazines so they could continue, which is the current standard nowadays, but CLAMP never got around to finishing Clover, and they never gave a particular reason for why they never went back to it. For all we know, it might have been out of their control, or maybe there's some legal issues involved that's preventing CLAMP from finishing not only Clover, but a bunch of their other manga, probably to the point where they wouldn't be able to legally be free to move their manga to another magazine for completion. As of now, who knows? This is why Clover's story is unfinished and why the characters don't get explored more than what we get. It's a shame, because for what it is, I genuinely like Clover, and it deserves to have its story concluded in some manner. Hey, if Samurai Jack can get an ending, why not this? One can only hope, right? While not one of CLAMP's best works, it's a criminally underrated manga that deserves more love than it gets, and it'll be perfect for sci-fi fans who love over-the-top cyberpunk settings.