365 Reasons to Love

Title: The Art of Cardcaptor Sakura - Vol. 2 and 3.

Artist(s)/Creator(s): CLAMP.

Pages: 128 each.

Release Date: 2000(?)

Retail Price: $19.99 each.

Price I bought it for: $50 for both (it was harder to find by the time I tried buying it so the price slightly went up)

Place I bought it from: Amazon.com

These two artbooks were next in line after the Album De Reproductions Artbook that I bought. Since I was only starting out, I thought I’ll just try to collect all the CLAMP artbooks. However, these artbooks were really a disappointment to me. Sure the artwork was typical CLAMP but there was so much white space and the pictures weren’t very high quality. The books are around B5 size except shorter width.

These are the artworks from Vol. 2:

The artwork is nice, I don’t deny that. However, it’s just too much white space: sometimes one picture would take up one page and 1/3 of the conjoined page, so there’s like 2/3 of a page blank. Like this one:

This is the whole picture, I just cut off the white space. There are a lot of full pages and two-page spreads in Vol. 2 than in Vol. 3.

Also, Vol 2 covers the second season of the Anime series, while Vol 1 covers the first season. Vol 3 is mainly a compilation of Sakura in different costumes and many (TOO MANY) chibi pictures.

The pictures are really cute though.. =3

Some of the picture is lost in the gutter, but it’s not that bad.

Comes with translated notes on the pictures.

And a cute short story. Also had a poster, but mine was ripped out. =(

Now for Vol. 3 pictures:

Sakura in different outfits that pop up in the manga and anime.

Very nice two-page spread but there’s only a couple in the entire book.

Now for the part that I didn’t like. The chibis. Sure they’re cute. But these kinds of pictures took up 30% of the artbook and that just means more white space.

When they’re good, they’re really good.

MMMHM

The first two books comprised the whole manga series basically, so this 3rd book feels like an accumulation of all the scrap art left over. Sakura is basically modeling different outfits. I also noticed that Sakura’s facial expression was nearly the same on every page (you know, the one with big eyes open and and giant half-circle smile). Vol. 3 also had no short story or poster like the first two volumes (it does have the translated notes though).

Overall, I didn’t really like these artbooks. Vol. 3 just disappointed me so much. I felt ripped since $50 would get you a very decent artbook like Kazuaki’s. I probably won’t try to find Vol. 1 either, unless it’s really cheap.