Cardcaptor Sakura is my favorite anime of all time. No matter how many series I see, nothing comes close the sweetness, the charm, the humor or the action of Cardcaptor Sakura. It is one of Clamp's best series(back before the pulled a Frank Miller and went insane by ruining their greatest creation. I'm looking at you Oedipus Reservoir Chronicle...), and one of the greatest magical girl series of all time. Despite all this I never owned the Cardcaptor Sakura manga. There are several reasons for this, one is that I never particularly liked the manga. I thought the first part was quite boring, some of the character relationships a little weird and quite honestly if I read the series first, I probably would not have the same level of love for it that I do. Additionally, the first English release was just plain awful. Badly printed, badly translated, mutilated art. But when I learned Dark Horse was releasing an omnibus with fresh translations, I decided to finally make the investment. So was it worth it?

Follow up:

Cardcaptor Sakura Omnibus 1 contains the first 3 volumes of the manga, covering the first half of the Clow Card arc. Typically, when manga is released in Omnibus, a lot is cut out in order to save money and printing pages. Dark Horse did the opposite. Not only did they include the original chapter pages, they included color versions, additional chapter art, front and back covers of the first 3 Japanese volumes and the character cards that were originally pull out inserts.

Not only do you get stuff that originally you had to buy art books separately for, the overall quality is amazing. The pages are beautifully printed from the original art. No blurriness, pixelation, cut offs, blank spaces or random black bars. The paper is high quality and almost blinding white. The pages have all their original sound effects with great matching translations, and some editing when fully appropriate.

This is also probably the single best translation I've ever read. I've read the original Tokyopop translations, as well as a few fan-trans and all of them were lacking. If you've read my blog for a while, you've probably read my blog about translation, and the problem with literal translations. Tokyopop just butchered the original script, but the fan trans were just far too literal. Dark Horse makes Sakura sounds like a spunky kid, Tomoyo comes off as a sophisticated weirdo and Touya is a classic jerk brother. It's like the merged what was good about Cardcaptors with its natural English conversations with the correct storyline of Cardcaptor Sakura. The honorifics are included but aren't intrusive and they handle the character relationships in a wonderfully subtle way.

It really feels like I'm reading the series for the first time. Rereading the series now that I'm older, I have a new appreciation for the Touya/Yukito dynamic, as well as Sakura/Tomoyo. Dark Horse handled it extremely maturely, still making it the very kids' comic it was meant to be. I am still immensely creeped out by Rika/Terada-sensei, but this and Mizuki-sensei were two parts of the series I always really disliked.

My one complaint with Dark Horse, however, is fairly significant. Their release dates are a joke. CCSv.1 was meant to come out last June and didn't get printed until October. CCSv.2 was meant to come out last December but it still isn't printed even though I preordered it. Besides this I really recommend this to anyone who has or has never read Cardcaptor Sakura. Even if you own the series already it is completely worth it to get it.