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A pretty girl is depicted in front of yellow flowers blooming against a deep blue green backdrop.
Julius, dressed as a man, attends the music school affiliated with the Church of Saint Sebastian. This portrait exudes both strength and fragility, as she lives with a secret that she cannot reveal.
Ikeda particularly favors sharp collars, but here, it appears as if the collar might pierce Julius' slender left wrist. This sharpness is contrasted against the softness of the black lace edging and the rich fabric.
Where does this complex depiction of Julius' internal experiences originate?
If you cover the left half of her face, she appears to be smiling with her eyes.
But if you cover the right half, she appears lonely and angry.
These two expressions blend into a single illustration.
What has happened in the past? What is happening now? What is about to happen?
The left hand seems to be grasping something, and we feel as if she is asking us about something important. It is indeed a mysterious picture.
*The work is made up of a set of 2prints
*Signature on prints (handwritten)
In 1967, Ikeda made her debut with Bara Yashiki no Shôjo while she was a student at Tokyo University of Education (now Tsukuba University). In 1972, her Margaret series The Rose of Versailles became a bestseller. In 1980, she won the Japan Cartoonists Association Award of Excellence for The Window of Orpheus. While in her forties, she decided to pursue a career in music, and in 1995, she enrolled in the Vocal Department of the Tokyo College of Music. Since graduating, she has been performing as a soprano singer and has appeared in numerous opera productions. She received France's Legion of Honour in 2009.
Riyoko Ikeda refers to The Rose of Versailles as her most representative work, and to The Window of Orpheus as her life's work. Serialization of The Window of Orpheus began in Weekly Margaret in January 1975. The series was moved to the magazine Monthly Seventeen starting with Part 2. The series lasted for a total of about seven years until Part 4 concluded in 1981. It is a long story spanning 18 Comics volumes. In 1980, she received the 9th Japan Cartoonists Association Excellence Award. In 1983, it was adapted for the theater as a Takarazuka production.
アーカイヴァル インクジェット プリント
Shueisha Manga-Art Heritage has entered into a business partnership with Epson, entrusting them with color management support and printing. The pigment inks used in the company’s inkjet printers are lightfast, preserving the original colors even under lighting that would cause the dye-based color inks used in the original artwork to fade.
On the other hand, original manga artwork is highly prone to fading, especially when it comes to color illustrations created using dye-based markers. Illustrations created for the covers of manga magazines, frontispieces, and comic book covers were not originally intended to be displayed or appreciated as works of art. They were designed to be printed and viewed by readers in magazines and comic books. Illustrations were often colored over copied line art, and in some cases, the characters and backgrounds were cut out and pasted in separately. To transform such illustrations into manga-art, they need to be retouched, such as by correcting discolored areas.
Since 2008, Shueisha has been working to digitally archive manga. Initially, we captured color originals using the EverSmart Supreme II, a high-precision scanner, and in 2015, we began using the Phase One IQ180, a high-resolution digital camera. Since 2020, we have been using Phase One’s Cultural Heritage series. This has allowed us to capture and preserve colors beyond the reproducible range of commercial printing, while also retaining the texture of the paper on which the illustrations were created.
Using this digitally archived data and imaging equipment, we retouch the artwork, restoring the original colors as they were when the illustrations were created. To produce the final print, color is carefully managed at each stage, from the original artwork to the captured data and printing.
For illustrations that were created digitally, we perform color management and printing in the wider-gamut Adobe RGB color space, instead of the sRGB space typically used in commercial printing, resulting in deeper and more vibrant colors.
