I finished this a while back, but for whatever reason, just hadn’t gotten around to blogging about it. That said, I rather enjoyed Cardcaptor Sakura and I’m annoyed with TokyoPop for not doing the 2nd-half of the manga properly (they dropped all Japanese honorifics for the final six volumes). But I digress…

As I mentioned before, the anime took the first six volumes and expanded them greatly into 46 episodes. The final six volumes were turned into 24 episodes (the final season). So there’s a whole lot of extra stuff in the anime that doesn’t appear in the manga. However, there are some things the anime writers for some reason decided to neglect.

The biggest item is the link between Clow Reed, Eriol-kun, and Sakura-chan’s father Fujitaka. In the anime, it was explained that Eriol-kun was the re-incarnation of Clow Reed. This is how the manga plays it as well, only Clow Reed didn’t just come back as a single person. He apparently split himself so that half of him became Eriol-kun and the other half Fujitaka. I was blown away by this, but then it made a question I’d always had in the back of my mind from the anime be answered. If Syaoran-kun was a descendant of Clow Reed, why was Sakura-chan able to master Clow Reed’s magic so easily? Fujitaka being another re-incarnation of Clow Reed explains it. Technically, she’s a direct descendant of Clow Reed and not a distant one like Syaoran.

This also explains a little puzzle I had at the begining of the Tsubasa manga. Fujitaka is the step father of Syaoran in that manga and Clow Reed was the father of Sakura-chan. I thought, “How can Clow Reed produce the same offspring that Fujitaka did in another word?” Now I know.

One other interesting item was how Sakura-chan took half of the power of Eriol-kun and gave it to her father at Eriol-kun’s request. Only Eriol-kun knew he was half of Clow Reed, but held all of that power. By giving her father half of that power, he was able to see his wife, which was sweet.

Another item of interest is how there are only 19 Clow Cards in the manga. There were 52 cards in the anime. No wonder some of the cards in the anime were such a stretch such as “The Sweet,” or the way it was impossible for Sakura to capture “The Twin.”

Now that I’ve read the manga, my next “Back To The Vaults” segment will feature the anime because I am keen to re-watch it while the manga is still fairly fresh in my mind. Still, as I read more and more CLAMP titles, I am even more amazed by their works Tsubasa and xxxHOLiC. The ladies of CLAMP are gifted storytellers to say the least.