Plot development and storyline :
The storyline of Claymore is set up on a medieval island world, infested with monsters called “Youma”. Youmas can shift their shape, disguise and live as humans within society. They retain the memories and knowledge of the human body they reside in, so normal humans can’t recognize them in their perfect disguise. Youmas eat human innards to live and can’t resist the urge to eat innards more than two weeks. So eventually they end up murdering humans brutally, to eat their guts.
A mysterious group called “The Organization” creates half human-half youma hybrid female warriors who kill youmas in exchange of money, that is collected by The Organization.
These hybrid warriors are called “Claymores” because they fight youmas using large and heavy “Claymore” swords that they always carry on their backs. People also refer to them as “Silver eyed witches” as all of the Claymores have silver colored eyes.
Youmas and Claymores are powered by a demonic energy called “Youki”. Youki grants them extreme strength and shape-shifting ability. Only Claymores can sense Youmas disguised as humans and kill them because they bear Youki, the same power as youmas.
People despise Claymores, as they are also half monsters. So the claymores are quite anti-social, cold natured and sometimes maniac. Killing people is a taboo for Claymores as proof of them being allies of humans, despite being half monsters. Claymore warriors don’t require much food and sleep as normal humans and they don’t age. So they are very effective weapons against youmas.
The island world of “Claymore manga” is divided into 47 regions. There are warriors ranked from 1 to 47 based on their overall abilities and each one of them are assigned to a specific region.
Claymore has pretty interesting character development. It starts with the protagonist, organization’s weakest warrior, no.47 ‘Clare’ completing her missions as a claymore. As the story progresses, Clare’s tragic past, her reason ‘to live’ and ‘become a claymore’ gets revealed. She gains comrades, experiences deadly battles and life-turning events. As time passes, characters grow stronger and experienced, new mysteries pop up.
The origin of youmas, the actual identity of the organization and its secrets and lots of exciting stuff happen throughout the whole manga. The most powerful of Awakened beings, “The Abyssal Ones” and the one above them, ‘Priscilla’... the manga continues as the story gets more and more intense, revolving all those characters.
It starts as a simple action-supernatural manga, but slowly it draws in the reader. It’s true beauty unfolds with heart-breaking tragedy and intense battle scenes. There’s no useless part in Claymore. All of the battles declare “Survival of the fittest”. A little gory, as the whole manga involves a lot of bloodshed and death. The swordfighting styles and techniques used in Claymore are ‘Real’, just a little modified and made compatible with the supernatural stuff.
Art:
Claymore’s art is as good as it’s storyline. All of the action scenes are drawn perfectly clear. Then comes the eye-catching background art. In some pages, backgrounds are drawn so perfectly that it’d seem like photographic sketch.
At first, people won’t notice Claymore’s character designs particularly. There are a lot of Claymores (Characters) in the manga, who may look almost same as one-another. You may think bad of Claymore’s character designs, but i assure you that it’s exactly the opposite of what you think.
According to the theory, all of the claymores have silvery eyes, hair and they wear a specific type of dress provided by the organization. With these restriction in characters’ features, there remains a very little room to make changes for each Claymore character. Yet the mangaka, YAGI NORIHIRO Sensei fully utilized this limited range of development. With slightest of differences in their hairstyle, shape of face, facial arrangements and unique personailities, he created every single claymore character significantly different from another, with those restricted features as handicap. And he successfully continued the ‘nearly impossible’ task of drawing all those characters with their minimal differences unchanged through all the chapters of Claymore. Due to the storyline, Claymore has some gory scenes in it. But NORIHIRO Sensei pulled it off so perfectly that it won’t creep people out much, even though it’s gore.
Why people should read Claymore:
Extreme display of swordfight, splendidly drawn actions scenes. It’s captivating storyline would make you glue up with it until you finish (though it’s ongoing). Alongside excellent art, Claymore’s plot is better than many popular/famous works of literature.
So dig in as fast as you can, and enjoy it’s awesomeness!