SHUEISHA Inc. All rights reserved.
Surrounded by swirling roses, Oscar begins to draw her sword. She is dressed in scarlet with golden epaulettes and cuffs. Her blue hair flows with the wind.
In the story Oscar's hair is blonde but here, her hair is blue.
If her hair been depicted as blonde in this image, it would have blended in with the golden color in her clothing and with her sword, and this would have mitigated the impact of the illustration. The blue color of her hair was chosen to match the cityscape of Paris as seen in the background, which is also drawn as a blue silhouette, adding to the tension to this work.
The illustration depicts a woman with a strong will and sword arm, unsurpassed by any man. Her presence continues to lend courage to people of all ages around the world.
*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.
A historical romance story set in the Palace of Versailles in Paris during the French Revolution. The imperial princess Marie Antoinette marries into the Bourbon family of France from the Habsburgs of the Austrian Empire at the age of 14. She is escorted by Oscar François de Jarjayes, who is the youngest daughter of the Commander of the Royal Guards, but was raised as a man. The series has attracted a wide audience since it was first published. It was adapted for a play performed at Takarazuka in 1974. In 1979, the title was made into an animated television series.
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.
