It needs to be said that I perhaps went into CLAMPdown with the wrong expectation. This is not an academic book, nor is it really a particularly deep or thought-provoking analysis of the works of manga creation group CLAMP. It also isn't necessarily looking to be either of those things, but for the manga scholar, this may prove to be less useful in your own research than anticipated. That said, it is quite readable, written in a fairly breezy style, and it charts a few interesting elements of CLAMP's works that aren't really noted in a lot of other places, even including a table of what cars everyone in Magic Knight Rayearth is named after and who loses their eyes and how across the CLAMPverse.

It's worth noting (but hardly a fault) that this was written primarily for a British audience, and contains plenty of references to British places and cultural elements. By this point we're all used to references we don't necessarily get, and Wolf includes tongue-in-cheek “translation notes” in the back of the volume for them, which is a fun way to handle it. But it does mean that readers risk being brought up short by some of Wolf's language. The two most striking words used are “Asperger's” and “c***,” both of which are more offensive in North American English than in British or Australian usage. The former is more contentious, since the term for what is now simply referred to as ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) was retired specifically because Asperger himself had strong ties to the Nazis, but generations of people were raised using the term as part of their identity. While I cannot tell them that they are wrong, because that's not my particular disability, I can say that as a Jewish woman its continued (and often repeated in the book) usage makes me uncomfortable. As for the other word, since c*** is highly offensive in North American English, Wolf's habit of tossing it around, particularly in footnotes directed at the reader, it can make for some difficult reading. He's clearly attempting to be funny in those notes, but North American readers should be aware that it is present and reader-directed. In a second edition, ideally the two terms mentioned above would join the cultural elements in the notes.

The meat of the book is interesting, if not as in-depth as I might have liked. Wolf traces CLAMP's history from their formation as a much larger group of doujinshi creators (he notes that some of their earliest works were JoJo's Bizarre Adventure doujinshi) to their mainstream debut with RG Veda, up through their present-day work on Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card. Reading this chronological presentation makes it upsettingly clear just how many of their works have gone on hiatus, and if X is his lamented title, mine is Clover, although I have to say that I felt that the work could have been complete at three volumes. Wolf goes into the most depth with the Tokyo Babylon and X chapters, and there is a lot to unpack there. I was somewhat surprised to see him consistently refer to Seishiro and Subaru as gay lovers, since my interpretation was that CLAMP was deliberately trying to be ambiguous about most of their (early) characters' sexuality, but it's hard to argue with the brilliant understatement about Fuuma in X getting “increasingly weird.”

The Tokyo Babylon assertion that Seishiro and Subaru are unambiguously a couple is symptomatic of Wolf's overall analysis, which is primarily based on his assertions or assumptions with minimal effort to provide evidence based on the text. While this is really only an issue if you're annoyingly scholarly (like me), it can make the book a little baffling in places. The prime examples here come in the Miyuki-chan in Wonderland and Clover chapters. In the former, Wolf insistently refers to Miyuki-chan in Wonderland as porn, which is a gross overstatement. There is no penetrative sex, no nipples, no fluids, and while the predatory lesbian trope is a major problem in the single-volume title, it in no way qualifies the book (or the OVA) as pornography, and that he calls it this, paired with his discomfort at reading Chobits on public transportation, says more about what makes him uncomfortable than the series in question. The issue in the Clover chapter is somewhat different; he makes almost no effort to analyze the story apart from a few comments about its unfinished status and the steam/cyberpunk art, and instead devotes the chapter to a comparison of CLAMP with the German band Kraftwerk. While that's not uninteresting, it's also not the point of the book or the chapter as laid out in the chapters previous and following it. Also worth noting is that Wolf rarely goes outside of CLAMP's works to look at what was happening around them in the manga world beyond a cursory mention of Sailor Moon. Since both Chobits and Mitsukazu Mihara's Doll came out in the same year (2000) and covered the same territory, (Doll was released in English by Tokyopop), this makes the analysis feel a bit shallower than it needs to.

There's one other choice Wolf makes that is worth mentioning but hardly a deal breaker either way. That is his attitude towards spoilers – rather than employ them in a couple of chapters, he prints them in mirror writing, to allow readers to skip or read them at their own discernment. While I found the choice a bit bizarre – I believe in a short statute of limitations on spoilers – for others, this will come as a relief, although both titles he's discussing are at least twenty years old at the time of writing.

CLAMPdown is an interesting effort to bring Wolf's love of the group's work to a larger audience. It is by turn informative and annoying, and depending on how much analysis you like in your purportedly analytical works will ultimately determine your feelings about it. If nothing else, it is an ode to CLAMP through one man's eyes, and it is hard to argue that the group doesn't deserve study and accolades.