I dunno, I like CLAMP, and going through my manga collection the other day, noticed I own quite a bit of their stories, but not all are for me.....and I've never read "man of many faces" but the whole idea of a 9 year old and a 5 year old talking about love and all so seriously is kind of a turn off....

I found this one a bit disturbing because as another commenter said, the main character is this sort of freakishly weird juvenile gentleman thief that goes around committing crimes only because his two moms decide that they want something. Yes, they are so fabulously wealthy that they could probably just buy it 100 times over easily but would rather have their son engage in criminal behavior. When he's not doing that, the plot [yes, there is one] is even less interesting.

In its fifteen or so years of existence, the manga team CLAMP has risen to legendary status. They do make some great - or at least well-selling - stuff. That said, they have made a lot of stuff, and some of it sucks utterly. Man of Many Faces is one of those unfortunate pieces.

The title character is some kind of disturbingly perfect prepubescent gentleman thief with a polygamist family and a legion of pedophilic fangirls. Sounds like it could be kind of interesting, right? Sort of? Except that he appears to spend the vast majority of his time not gentleman thieving but having disturbingly chaste cakes with a five-year old girl in her bedroom. Everyone's favorite hobby appears to be sitting in a pile of screentones and spewing huge walls of text about ridiculous parables and cliches. There is an entire thoughtful page devoted to a monologue on the moral demonstrated in the famous Some Like it Hot line "I'm a man!"

The randomly-selected messages CLAMP plonks down every three pages often manage to be both stupid and politically incorrect. The masked man's toddling lady love spends her entire life trying to figure out how to cook (even though he's practically a master chef) so that she can drop out of high school and get married to him (even though she's a supergenius) because that is a wife's duty. And yes, they really do say that. Although it was a little hard to see through all the screentones.

What good can I say about this? I don't know, the paper might have some worth?

... Last updated on May 8th, 2010, 3:31pm

All I can say is that even though it's a tad short, the main character is loyal to one girl, even as they grow up together, and the series has one of those good endings that ties up things. The series itself was interesting, him being a master thief, though it was weird how he had two moms. It even has the two extras that show the wedding and then their married life. For those who want a romance with the kind of ending you wish other series had.