Cardcaptor Sakura, Volume 1

Cardcaptor Sakura was the first CLAMP series I ever read and it continues to remain my all-time personal favorite mahou shoujo manga. I just love everything about this series! All the characters are loveable, you even get attached to the characters that you start off hating at first! Sakura also breaks all the stereotypical mahou shoujo heroines! Most heroines are usually very clumsy, always late to school, like to procrastinate, and drool over every single guy they see, but Sakura is actually quite atheletic, usually on time, does fairly average at school, and the only boy she has a crush on is her brother's best friend, Yukito. She doesn't rush into battle without any plan of attack yet come out completely unscathed, unlike most mahou shoujo heronies, either. Sakura actually plans a strategy to capture the Clow Cards, proving that she has brains as well as guts! The best example I can think of for this is in the Watery card chapter of the manga. Sakura has to capture the really powerful Elemental card, Watery, but at this point in the series she only has three Clow Cards she can use to capture it with, and none of them are powerful enough to do it on their own. So, Sakura lures the Watery card into her school freezer with the Fly card, then freezes it by trapping it with the Windy card and is finally able to capture it! Cardcaptor Sakura also doesn't bore you with lengthy transformation sequences or "I will punish you" speeches either, as Sakura relies on her best friend Tomoyo to design all of her battle costumes for her, which can also provide plenty of cosplay ideas! The artwork is really good too, as always with CLAMP, and the pacing of this series is perfect! Not once did I ever feel that the storyline was rushed or dragging! Although Cardcaptor Sakura does follow a formulatic approach at times, there are plenty of plot twists to keep the reader always on the edge of your seat and some of the chapters don't even involve Sakura capturing the Clow Cards at all! Heck, even the entire last volume of the manga has practically no magic in it, which goes to show that Cardcaptor Sakura is more about its storyline and characters rather than action. While personally I prefer the anime's version ending, the manga's ending wrapped things up nicely and is probably one of the sweetest CLAMP endings I've ever read. Not only is this an excellent series, but Tokyopop has even given this manga a five-star re-release! When the Cardcaptor Sakura manga was originally released in English, Mixxzine flipped all of the artwork, Americanized a lot of Japanese food and the dialog, changed it so that everyone called Yukito "Yuki" instead of just Touya, goofed up on what Shaoran's surname was, mispelt Mizuki-sensei's name as "Mitsuki-sensei", replaced any Japanese text with English text, and generally did a sloppy job on it. However, this re-release fixes all of those problems! Not only is the artwork unflipped and the translation revised, but t

Someone reccomended this series to me because me and Sakura shared a name. I wasn't a big shoujo fan, but I ended up buying them all. Funny, endearing and heartfelt, Cardcaptor Sakura is one of the best manga ever written. (Although I must say, something is lost when it is translated into English. It's good nonetheless.) The story goes that a girl named Sakura opens a book in her father's library and releases spirit cards created centuries ago by a magician named Clow into the world. It is now her task, accompanied by the sun guardian Kero (looks like a lion in full form) and (later) the moon guardian Yue (reminiscent of an angel) to capture them and return them to the book. The cards periodically appear to wreak havoc, and Sakura goes out to combat them with a mix of magic and courage. Her best friend Tomoyo (Madison in the TV series) is always there to make sure she looks sharp in one of her costumes and film the whole affair. Along with capturing the cards, she strives to win over her rival Li Shaolan, a descendant from Clow's family and fellow cardcaptor. Through all the typical fantasy manga in the series wends a funny, painful story about Sakura's relationships with her friends and family, and about their relationships with each other. A must have, with a little bit of fantasy, comedy, and romance and drama to please everyone.

This series is absolutely wonderful. It's about Sakura, a 10-year-old girl who finds a magic book inside her father's library. Inside the book is a set of magic cards, which escape and cause trouble all over the city. So, she sets out to find and capture all the cards, with the help of a magical beast named Kero. This is a series by CLAMP (for those who don't know, they're a very popular comic-making team from Japan) , so of course the artwork is beautiful, and the story is sweet without getting too sugary. It's mostly meant for girls, but some boys might like the card-capturing action scenes. And it's an "all-ages" book, so it's good for everyone to read!

Cardcaptors Sakura #1 rox da house! Ok, off the slang. I thought that this comic book had really sweet (cool) animation. I liked how they showed their actions in the book. For instance, when they're mad, you can tell THEY'RE MAD. It's really nice also because there are five of the smaller comic books combined into one for less mula, I mean money. The five main characters are Toya (Sakura's brother), Yuki (Toya's handsome friend), Tomoyo (Sakura's rich best friend), Kerberos (Kero is his nickname and he's the 'keeper of the clow cards'. A funny and hilarious 'stuffed animal' who talks), and, of course, SAKURA (The main character of the comic who is trying to find and capture all the clow cards). Sakura, the cardcaptor, was your average, athletic, fourth grader until she went down into the basement. There she found the Clow card book. Suddenly, when she opened it, images of creatures flew out of the book, surronding her, then left out of the room. Little did she know that this was the start of a hectic, long-going adventure. The comic book is also interesting because, like all Japanese comics, they have a little romance going on between two character, Yuki and Sakura. Hopefully, if you buy this book, you'll enjoy it as much as I do and be in suspense waiting for the next book supposedly coming out on December 31, 2000. ^_^

CLAMP has outdone themselves again. An ordinary girl named Sakura accidentally comes upon a magical book with missing cards. Without the book to hold the cards in, the cards become alive and wreck havoc on the world. It becomes Sakura's responsibility to capture those cards strategically. When she captures a card, she gains the ability to control that card. For example, capturing the Wind card allows her to control winds, and so forth. There are plenty of twists and side stories as well.CLAMP's artwork far surprasses all the other shoujo manga (Sailor Moon, Fushigi Yuugi, etc.)... in fact, their uniqueness and usage of detail make them my favorite manga artist overall. Card Captor Sakura is stellar, and unlike other shoujo mangas, Sakura doesn't wear the same boring uniform every day, which was a big plus for me. Eye candy aside, the story itself is excellently written and engrossing. If you are familiar with Magic Knight Rayearth or X/1999--the other two CLAMP works that are more well known here in the USA--I believe that Card Captor Sakura is better than either. Magic Knight Rayearth, at least the manga, was simply too short and much too rushed. On the other hand, X/1999 is much too drawn-out and confusing and shallow (due to the fact that fighting and gore scenes take up the vast majority of the manga's content). Card Captor Sakura has just the right combination of romance, action, humor, plot, pace, and mystery.