Read ‘Claymore,’ Manga’s Best-Kept Dark Fantasy Secret

A PSA to experience Norihiro Yagi’s gatekept series before the live‑action adaptation breaches containment and has its fandom sweating. There are no two ways about it: gatekeeping and those who uphold it are the fun police, standing in the way of people getting put onto something worth celebrating. But in manga circles, gatekeeping series like Claymore by never talking about them is less about keeping the freaks out from ruining the series and more about keeping studios from leering at it as the next live-action adaptation victim. But seeing as how CBS is already eyeing a live-action show because fellow fan and Heroes actor Masi Oka couldn’t stick to protocol, allow us to regale you on why this gory, dark fantasy series is a certified classic. Reductively, Claymore, created by Norihiro Yagi, reads like The Witcher by way of Berserk. Like both, its dystopian, middle-aged world is crawling with nightmarish demons. Here, they’re H.R. Giger-esque monsters called “yoma” who inherit their victims’ memories after consuming them. But what Claymore brings to the table that The Witcher and Berserk don’t, and what starkly sets its brand of macabre world apart, is, as Saoirse Ronan would say, “women.” © Norihiro Yagi/Shonen Jump More specifically, the story follows Clare, a half-human, half-yoma mercenary from an all-female troupe known as Claymores, wandering from village to village, taking contracts to exterminate yoma with a sword as big as she is. And things get even more dicey when fighting among the claymores adds even more danger to the series’ already fraught world, where humans and demons alike are getting hacked up into mists of blood. Okay, cool. Claymore is similar to other dark fantasy series, but it has women. Hell, it’s even already gotten an anime adaptation by Madhouse, one of old-head anime fans’ most lauded studios, that’s okay at best but ultimately still holds up. So why is that grounds enough for its quiet legion of fans to stay hush about the series in fear of it getting an adaptation beyond the obvious fear the prefix has garnered over the years? Well, Claymore occupies that same space as Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond in that even when folks sweatily discuss wanting an adaptation of it, the very real fear of that ever coming to pass, even if it’s by a studio as self-assured as Arcane‘s Fortiche, is that translating the awe-inspiring artistry of the source material is nigh impossible. And Claymore‘s art is otherworldly. © Norihiro Yagi/Shonen Jump © Norihiro Yagi/Shonen Jump © Norihiro Yagi/Shonen Jump © Norihiro Yagi/Shonen Jump Yagi’s artistry with Claymore‘s character and creature designs deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as that of absolute masters of their craft, like Kentaro Miura or Tsutomu Nihei, whose work on sci-fi series like Blame! and Knights of Sidonia is truly peak, as the kids say. The way he renders horror through the grotesque elegance of his beasties, the oppressive, grimdark density of its world, and the alien anatomy of the Claymores feels both impossible and meticulously thought through. Plus, witnessing his statuesque sisters-in-arms who can kick your ass with ease, contort and bloom into split-lipped monsters, evolving into forms so strange they feel like glimpsing at biblically accurate angels, will have you making short work flipping through the manga’s pages and wanting more of what Yagi was cooking back in the early aughts. Amid the viscera and body horror, Yagi also threads quiet, tender human moments in a manner similar to the aforementioned mangaka. And it’s that exact balance between cosmic monstrosity and fragile grace that’s why adaptations of Berserk, Blame!, and Knights of Sidonia have struggled to translate in both anime series and films. While not complete crapshoots by any metric of the 3DCG-averse anime fan, their aesthetics encounter a similar dissonance that Mappa’s adaptation of Q Hayashida’s Dorohedoro has with diehards in that they simply can’t translate the raw, hand-crafted artistry of manga panels to the screen in the same fashion. In its wake, they create something good and worth experiencing, sure, but nothing beats the concentrated brilliance of reading Claymore for yourself. Sure, a studio today—Madhouse included, given what it’s pulled off with Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End—could absolutely knock a Claymore remake out of the park if it decided to go the Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood route. But remakes are a trend that’s already wearing thin, in the same way endless remakes have in the video game industry, when the original source material is great on its own and we could otherwise get something entirely new. But a new adaptation would still be infinitely preferable to the deflating news that CBS Studios, of all places, has Claymore breaching containment and marching toward live-action territory. Charitably speaking, for the rest of us Claymore fans reflexively clicking our tongues at Oka breaking our unspoken