As a child of the 1970s, I appreciate a good disaster flick, whether the devastation is local or global, natural or man-made. There’s something immensely satisfying about watching the world go up in flames, only to walk outside the theater and be reassured by the presence of stop lights, busses, coffee shops, and pedestrians going about their business. Small wonder, then, that I adored CLAMP’s X back in 2003. Not only did it have an impossibly large cast of attractive characters, it also boasted awesome scenes of destruction — scenes worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster.
When VIZ announced that it would be reissuing X in a deluxe edition, however, I had misgivings about the project: would the apocalypse be as good the second time around?
In 2003, I’d swooned over the illustrations, re-read favorite scenes, and marveled at the fact that all the characters dressed like refugees from a 1980s music video. Though my inner snob normally disdained anything so purple, I secretly loved the all-caps dialogue, the swirling lines and wind-swept hairdos, and the melodramatic death scenes, not to mention the eerie, post-apocalyptic dream sequences that were sprinkled throughout the series. X read like a hybrid of The Seventh Sign (not to be confused with The Seventh Seal, a much classier flick), Götterdämmerung, and Captain EO, and I couldn’t get enough of it.
At the time I was collecting X, I hadn’t read much else, save a handful of manga by CLAMP and Rumiko Takahashi. The very qualities that drew me to X — angstful conversations, tortured characters — soon had the opposite effect on me: I started to avoid comics in which the emotional volume was cranked up to eleven on every page, as I found them exhausting, the manga equivalent of Tristan and Isolde. Re-reading Tokyo Babylon, for example, I was mortified by my initial enthusiasm for the story, which now seemed hopelessly overripe to me; not since I’d re-read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe had I been so disappointed by a favorite text.
Revisiting X proved a more rewarding experience, though the series’ structural flaws were more readily apparent on a second reading. The dialogue, for example, is often unintentionally hilarious: bystanders comment on the main characters, helpfully telling us how wonderful they are (“Last week, he saved my son from drowning in the river,” one anonymous mother says of Fuma), while the main characters introduce themselves to one another as if they’re networking, not preparing to kill each other. (Sample: “The name’s Sorata Arisugawa! A cute ‘n’ fun-lovin’ high school senior!” “Allow me to return the favor. I am Yuto Kigai. A humble public servant in the local ward office.”) Kotori, the first major female character to be introduced, embodies the Mary Sue concept to a tee; not only is she beautiful, kind, and long of hair, but she’s also very delicate, beset with a heart so weak that she collapses whenever someone frowns. More amusing still are the characters who materialize at the very moment they’re needed: witness the introduction of Tokiko Magami, a school nurse who just so happens to be Kamui’s sole surviving relative, and a fount of information about Kamui’s mother.
Yet these moments of narrative clumsiness are overpowered by the sheer force of the imagery. The battle scenes are kinetic and violent, as characters leap across rooftops, level buildings, and plunge their swords into one another; few licensed shojo or shonen titles can match the gory zest with which CLAMP executes these moments of hand-to-hand combat. The dream sequences, too, are shockingly graphic: characters are dismembered, crucified, impaled, and engulfed in flames, often right before their loved ones’ eyes. Though these images teeter on the brink of kitsch — in one dream, Kamui cradles Kotori’s severed head in his arms — they underscore one of the series’ most important points: sacrifice and loss are a fundamental part of becoming an adult, whether that sacrifice means leaving one’s family (as Sorata and Lady Arashi have done) or losing them (as Kamui, Fuma, and Kotori do in the early chapters of the manga).
The series’ other major theme — that humans are poor stewards of Mother Earth — is less successfully illustrated; three volumes in, it still isn’t clear what, exactly, the Seven Seals are charged with doing: preventing nuclear war? staving off pollution? protecting spotted owls? What will happen if the Seals fail, however, is evocatively rendered; CLAMP draws a post-apocalyptic Tokyo worthy of Katsuhiro Otomo, a landscape of twisted skyscrapers and rotting corpses slowly engulfed by sand dunes.
The fact that these images appeared in Monthly Asuka and not Young Magazine is what makes X so remarkable: it may not be the best shojo fantasy ever written, but it certainly is one of the bloodiest, a fierce, angry blast of emotion that scorches everything in its path. I hesitate to suggest that X‘s body count is an achievement, but it is sharp and welcome rebuke to the idea that female readers strongly prefer conversation and character development to butt-kicking and carnage. Count me in for volume two.
Review copy provided by VIZ Media, LLC.
X, VOL. 1 • BY CLAMP • VIZ MEDIA • 580 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)
KATE: Though I’m not sure why Kodansha felt it was necessary to release a third edition of 
MICHELLE: This week’s chart at Midtown Comics looks pretty bizarre, since they are finally getting in all those Kodansha releases they were missing before. I advocate strongly for quite a few of them—Sailor Moon, Arisa, Shugo Chara!…—but I am going to have to award my pick to the fifth volume of Cross Game, which comes out this week along with several other of VIZ’s Shonen Sunday titles. I enthused about this particular volume in a recent Off the Shelf column, where I concluded my remarks by saying, “If you like sports manga, you will like Cross Game. And if you don’t like sports manga, you will still like Cross Game.” And lo, MJsubsequently read the first volume and 
MJ: Honestly, I’m really tempted to third Cross Game, but I guess in the interest of spreading the love, I’ll go with volume three of Kim Hyung-Min and Yang Kyung-Il’s 
DAVID: I’m going to surprise myself by not third-ing Cross Game (SECRET CODE: I’m totally actually third-ing Cross Game by claiming that I’m not) by giving a little leg-up to a new shônen series from Kodansha by Ryou Ryumon and Kouji Megumi, 
DAVID: It’s the first week of the month, so Viz follows its customary practice of flooding the shelves with new volumes of shônen and shôjo series. While they could certainly learn to pace themselves, I won’t complain if it means I can get my hands on the fifth volume of Julietta Suzuki’s 
KATE: My vote goes to the fourth volume of 
MICHELLE: There’s a lot on this week’s list—which includes the final volumes of both Eyeshield 21 and Seiho Boys’ High School—that I personally plan on purchasing, but the one I look forward to with the most glee is volume 25 of Yoshiki Nakamura’s 
SEAN: As always with Viz blitz weeks, there’s any number of titles I could talk about, including the aforementioned final volume of Seiho (I love Eyeshield, but it should have ended 3 volumes before it did). And I really want to pick Hark! A Vagrant as well, but it manages to not be manga. So my pick this week goes to a new Weekly Shonen Jump series, the first from Viz in quite some time. 
MJ: Well, it’s been mentioned a few times, but I’ll be the one to come down firmly on the side of volume eight of 
MJ: We’ve hit a slow week again at Midtown Comics, but there’s at least one standout in the mix. This week, we’ll see the release of Osamu Tezuka’s 
KATE: Since David and MJhave taken up the cause of Human Insects, I’m going to plug 
SEAN: If I had to rely on Midtown’s lists for my PotW, I’d never mention Kodansha at all. And I already mentioned Sailor Moon and Sailor V two weeks ago. So I will once again go to the 
SEAN: As I noted in my shipping post earlier in the week, 
DAVID: It is hard to pass up on either Fullmetal or Five Leaves, but I can never seem to resist throwing my support to boutique publisher Fanfare/Ponent Mon and its mainstay manga-ka, Jiro Taniguchi. Now, I unexpectedly find myself liking Taniguchi’s manly-man meditations, books like The Quest for the Missing Girl, just a little bit more than his more subdued pieces like A Distant Neighborhood. In my perfect world, we’d be getting a new volume of The Summit of the Gods before the debut of 
MICHELLE: I intend to buy every single book mentioned above, but I’m going to have to award my pick to volume seven of Yuu Watase’s 
