Comic Thoughts: Innocent
I just finished the last chapter of Innocent & Innocent Rouge. I was craving some grown-up-oriented manga and settled on this. It was certainly something.
-Together the two series form an overly dramaticised and sexualised retelling of the french revolution through the eyes of the Samson family of executioners spanning from the 1750s to the rise of Napoleon.
It's full of detailed artwork, many gender-and-sexually-ambiguous characters, and a whole lot of gore.
The work didn't do much for me overall. While the growth of the central characters was interesting over such a span of time, the whole experience felt kinda vapid. An excuse to draw pretty boys, frilly dresses, and grotesque imagery.
What kept me coming back was the historical accuracy (or lack thereof). My existing knowledge about the events of the french revolution were pretty limited, though I had listened to a podcast about the lives of executioners of those times. I found myself frequently looking up characters that showed up in the story to see if they had been real, and what really happened with them (according to historical accounts, at least).
That made the whole experience pretty neat. I'm not much of a history buff, but the comic had me thinking "there's no way that actually happened" only to be proven wrong, as well as watching documentaries, podcasts, etc about the revolution and characters to fill in the gaps that the story skips over.
I can't recommend the series as either manga or a historical resource. Honestly, I'm slightly ashamed to have made it through the entire series as it practically fetishises the whole french revolution and executions in general. But I certainly learned about some french history as a side effect, even if that wasn't the intent of the work.