Clamp: The One I Love

I bought this for Plaxy for Christmas, but I think I liked it more than she did...

It's actually by half of Clamp, written by Nanase Ohkawa with cute, ultra-girly art by Mick Nekoi – the look is kind of a hybrid of Clamp-style cool and old-school shojo. The book is a slender collection of twelve seven-page stories on the theme of love, each based around a single word (my favourites were “Aitai”, I miss you, and “Kirei”, pretty) and accompanied by a short essay.

It's a more satisfying read than the size and format perhaps imply, and because each story is so like a natural little train of thought (a feeling reinforced by the brief, amusing essays) the overall impression amounts to more than you'd expect. The stories are highly personal and rather literary in flavour – like a lot of manga shorts, they're more impressionistic than an artsy Western comic would dare to be, and the content is very ordinary and universal – not quite what we expect from the creators of Magic Knight Rayearth!

A fun, unusual shojo manga that's well worth checking, especially if you've never ready any romantically-inclined comics before.