Books: ×××HOLiC Vol. #10 (CLAMP)

The girls of CLAMP have been serving up a heady brew named ×××HOLiC (typically just pronounced “holic”) for some time now, and it’s one of those series that gets almost incredibly unfairly dismissed. First there’s the bizarre name — although you get around that fairly quickly — but then there’s the question of what exact pigeonhole to allot to this mix of frothy situational comedy and Gothic-mystical morality play. It’s fun and funny, to be sure, but there are times when its waters run much deeper than you might expect, and that throws people off. But it also reeks of the kind of pungent originality that I read manga to find in the first place, and it has some of the most luscious (if also at times heavily oversimplified) artwork throughout CLAMP’s canon.

The premise actually isn’t that complicated, but the CLAMP team have rung a great many changes on it over the course of the previous nine volumes, so you’re almost certainly going to need to back up to the beginning and read from there. Watanuki, a young man in high school, has an unwanted affinity for spirits — he can sense them and interact with them even if he doesn’t want to. Enter Yūko, the boozy, leggy, cigarette-holder-wielding owner of a curio shoppe (it makes sense to spell it that way in this series). Her forte is cutting deals of a supernatural bent: she can give you what you want, but always at a cost, and sometimes you won’t know the dimensions of the cost until it’s too late. Likewise, she can remove Watanuki’s “curse,” but only if he puts himself in her employ … and the depths he’ll have to traverse to work off the cost will in time take their toll on him. There are also intermittent crossovers with CLAMP’s other ongoing series, Tsubasa (and also previously in Legal Drug), but you can read either series without having to read the other (although according to the creators you get more of a perspective on what’s going on if you read both).

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