Riyoko Ikeda was born in 1947 and has been drawing comics for as long as she can remember, but like most Japanese artists she has had no formal art training. Ikeda's career in art began in 1967 after she dropped out the philosophy department of Tokyo University of Education. One of Ikeda's greatest comics is The Rose of Versailles. Like nearly all girls' comics, human relations, fashion, and infatuation are central to The Rose of Versailles, but it also skillfully incorporates the history of the French Revolution. The Rose of Versailles has three main characters: Marie Antoinette; her Swedish lover, Hans Axel Von Fersen; and Oscar Francois de Jarjayes. Oscar, a creation of Ikeda, is a girl who dresses lik ea man and becomes a commander of the palace guards. Like the heroine of Osamu Tezuka's early girls' comic, Ribon no Kishi ("Princess Knight), Oscar's blurred sexuality allows her to take part in all the action and also to explore te thrills of love. The Rose of Versailles is more than 1,700 pages long and sells today as a set of eleven paperbaks, or five hardcover volumes. One of the Riyoko Ikeda's biggest accomplishments has been to present history in a wat that appeals to her readers. She is a stickler for detail. Most of the characters in The Rose of Versailles are real historical figures (with the obvious exception of Oscar), and most of the events actually took place. Besides The Rose of Versailles, Ikeda is probably best known for her major epic, Orufeusu no mado ("Orpheus's Window"), a saga of the Russian Revolution over 3,000 pages long with quotations from sources like John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World.

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