Clamp (manga Artists) - Business Model

Business Model

The members of Clamp all share a single workplace and as such do not need to arrange specific meetings. Nanase Ohkawa acts as the group's spokesperson, producer-director, and storyboarder. Mokona is the chief character designer, while Igarashi and Nekoi work for the background; however, the three often shuffle their roles. Sometimes, they may split the work of the characters and backgrounds or have one person draw all the art depending on the story. The three artists try to stay as "close as possible" to Ohkawa's original designs. Ohkawa advises the artists on what colors to use. Although Ohkawa chooses which projects they decide to decline or accept, Satsuki Igarashi decides on the actual time and order the group works on each project, creating the schedules for time allotted to each individual work. They do not have any assistants stating that assistants would slow them down as the assistants would not understand the "years worth of jargon" they created among themselves.

Once Ohkawa has conceived a story, the four members of the group gather "to discuss the purpose of the story and its main characters." After the group become familiar with the story, Ohkawa drafts an outline for the story during which time, she determines the story setting. The ending for each story is predetermined. Ohkawa designs many of the characters early in the story's development; frequently appearing guest characters are designed from the beginning whereas minor characters are designed early on. As Ohkawa drafts the outline, the other three members formulate character designs by creating character profile sheets so as to avoid confusion. After drawing a sample story and sketch for their editor and receiving approval, Ohkawa assigns the roles to each group member and then chooses the visual styles depending on factors such as the complexity of the story, the chosen art style, and its relationship to the group's other works. Ohkawa provides a rough draft for each chapter detailing things such as dialogue, panel size, props, movement, and character's emotions.

On average for each chapter that they produce (for Clamp, an average of 20 pages of artwork in a magazine), storyboarding takes twelve hours, the script takes eight hours to write, and the artwork depends on the story. For example, a chapter of xxxHolic takes two days whereas a chapter of X took four to five days.