What Are the X Art Books?
Two hardcovers that hold the color X: the paintings the black-and-white monthly could never show.
Monthly Asuka printed X in black and white, but CLAMP painted it constantly: covers, magazine color pages, posters, and the tarot series. Kadokawa collected that color work in two large hardcover art books under the line X Illustrated Collection.
X ZERO
The first collection, 2000The book
X ZERO: X Illustrated Collection, Kadokawa Shoten, first published 31 March 2000, 152 pages, hardcover, ISBN 4-04-853168-9.
What is inside
The color illustrations of the manga’s first era, reproduced at art-book scale, with very little text to interrupt them. Reviewers of the pair of books consistently single out ZERO’s density of classic-period CLAMP painting.
The Fool
ZERO is the original home of the tarot’s missing card, The Fool, which never appeared in a manga volume and completed the set only in the 2023 clear-card revival.
X INFINITY
The second collection, 2005The book
X Illustrated Collection 2: X INFINITY, Kadokawa Shoten, 1 December 2005, ISBN 4-04-853895-0. A new version of ZERO was issued the same season (24 November 2005, ISBN 4-04-853894-2) under the title X ZERO [new version].
What changed
The later illustrations show CLAMP’s matured style, the same shift visible between the manga’s first volumes and its last: longer figures, finer line, a colder palette. Set beside ZERO, the two books are a time-lapse of one art team across the years the manga stalled.
Reading them together
ZERO is the 1990s at full ornament; INFINITY is the 2000s at full control. For the art-first reader they are not supplements to X. They are half the work.