Pretty much as soon as they made their debut, CLAMP launched an extensive shared manga universe revolving around an elite city-sized school campus shaped like a pentagram. Their Clamp School works don't seem to be fondly remembered these days, but I suppose they paved the way for the future Tsubasa/xxxHOLIC/Cardcaptor shared universe, which miraculously took off.

My opinion on Clamp School Detectives is that it sucks ass, so I went into Defenders with the minimum of expectations. It's still not *good*, but it's miles better. School Detectives is ostensibly a comedy, but it has a hard time landing even ten percent of its jokes. School Defenders succeeds in being a little funnier by sheer virtue of being a gag manga. The tokusatsu bits run dry pretty quickly, but what emerges is an unfathomable romance followed by a bizarre third-act twist straight out of Rocky Horror. It's weird, it's stupid, and if I had bought a Toykopop volume of this as a kid I would have eaten it right up.

Let's be real here, I'm giving this manga a lot of pity points because one of the main characters repeatedly mentions how he's in love with his superhero partner and just wants to be his tradwife. Sometimes a transsexual from thirty years ago successfully reaches through the pages and makes me feel something, anything, from reading a mediocre CLAMP manga.