Unable to attend the Dark Horse panel at SDCC this past weekend, and hopelessly technologically limited since then, this news has taken its time making the way to the front page at Kuriousity, but that’s certainly no indication of my excitement over this announcement!
Dark Horse employees announced at their SDCC panel that they’ve acquired the licenses to multiple CLAMP series and will be releasing them in their entirety in special omnibus editions. This is a part of their continued celebration for CLAMP’s 20th Anniversary, including their recently released omnibus collection of CLAMP’s lyrical Clover series.
The series announced were Magic Knight Rayearth, Cardcaptor Sakura and Chobits. All three of these series were previously published in English by Tokyopop over multiple-volume runs (in that order).
Cardcaptor Sakura will be released in four-omnibus books. This, to my assumption, means there will be two books per CCS series: Cardcaptor Sakura and Cardcaptor Sakura: Master of the Clow. Chobits, originally eight volumes, will be rereleased as two volumes in Spring 2010 and Magic Knight Rayearth will also see two volumes making it one per series: Magic Knight Rayearth 1 and Magic Knight Rayearth 2.
All three series are among CLAMP’s top-sellers and have had multiple successful runs around the world along with anime adaptations, video games and numerous merchandising endeavours. It’ll be great seeing the original series re-released for English readers after years of being out of print, and with the exceptional quality of Dark Horse’s Clover omnibus, I’ve no doubt they’ll be well worth a buy for fans new and old.
This announcement, on top of the other CLAMP-related news shared by Del Rey (update on their CLAMP in America book) and Yen Press (licenser of Kobato), it’s a great testament to both the talent and popularity that CLAMP possesses to have such a widespread focus by numerous North American manga publishers (and us CLAMP fans aren’t complaining any either).
Details of these announcements are courtesy of Anime Vice’s Gia Manry.
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I was surprised that Rayearth was picked up, since TP did a reprint of it only a few years ago, and those volumes are still readily available.
That said, Card Capture is a series i've long wanted to read, but havent been able to get and the scanlated versions are abysmal so i wont read them. This is one series on my to buy list.
Same for chobits, TP did a right hatchet job on that (Summomo beng renamed Plum anyone?), so i'm looking forward to seeing a better version of that.