The X Manga Gallery
This is the paper shelf for X, CLAMP's apocalyptic manga of 1992 to 2003. Kadokawa Shoten collected it in eighteen tankobon volumes under the Asuka Comics label, each named for a musical movement: Prelude, Overture, Sonata, and on to Inversion. Five later chapters, all that was published after volume 18, circulated for years in magazines and a CLAMP guidebook before Kadokawa finally gave them their own book, volume 18.5, in November 2023.
A note on the pictures, stated plainly: the original Japanese Asuka covers are documented below with their dates and ISBNs but are not pictured, because no openly verifiable source for the full set could be confirmed in this pass. What is pictured, completely, is the English cover run, and the new Japanese Premium Collection art. The gap is logged for a future pass.
THE FIRST VOLUME
X, 1992 and 2023Volume 1, in two languages
The Japanese originals played a different game. The Asuka Comics fronts of 1992 to 2002 were deliberately plain, and the real cover event ran down the spines, which join into one continuous picture on a shelf, and onto the dust-jacket flaps, which carried the tarot illustrations. Viz gave every English volume a full CLAMP painting instead. The grid below shows the complete English cover run, with the Japanese volume data under each one.
VOLUMES 1 TO 9
The English covers, with the Japanese record
VOLUMES 10 TO 18
To Inversion, 2002
THE VOLUME THAT WAITED TWENTY YEARS
18.5, at lastVolume 18.5
Volume 18.5 collects the five chapters printed in Monthly Asuka in early 2003 and first reprinted in the CLAMP Newtype Platinum supplement of 2006 and the guidebook All About CLAMP in 2009. It is as far as the story has ever been published, and it is not the ending: CLAMP's plan was expected to run to about twenty-one volumes.