The Fall 2023 Manga Guide

Innocent

What's It About? 

Born into a family of executioners, Charles-Henri Sanson must take up his father's mantle as the Royal Executioner of Paris. Conflicted between his desire to honor the family name and rebelling against the longstanding practice, he chooses to follow tradition but vows to be the last executioner—the last Sanson to spill blood in the name of justice.

Innocent has a story and art by Shin'ichi Sakamoto. The English translation is by Michael Gombos with lettering by Susie Lee. Published by Dark Horse Comics (November 21, 2023).


Content Warning: The following manga discusses graphic torture, child abuse, implied rape, incest, and animal cruelty. Viewer discretion is advised.

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

It's uncomfortable today to think that there was a time when "executioner" was a profession and a respected one at that. Shin'ichi Sakamoto's Innocent takes us back to those days for a fictionalized (and very romanticized) biography of one of history's best-known, Charles-Henri Sanson, the man who advocated for the switch to the guillotine and claimed the head of Louis XVI, Maximilien Robespierre, and other major figures of the French Revolution. (His son Henri was Marie Antoinette's executioner after Charles-Henri retired.) Sakamoto's historically rich style is perfect for this sort of story, and if you've ever wondered how luscious noblemen's clothes were in the mid-18th century, this is a gorgeous example. I have never seen falls of lace drawn so beautifully in a manga, and all of the period details are just so. It's a gorgeous book.

Or at least it is in part. This is a story about an executioner, after all, and many parts require a strong stomach. And more than just being about the various methods of execution in use at the time, several of which I was blissfully unaware of until reading this book, Sakamoto lards the story with plenty of other content warnings: implied rape and incest, torture, animal cruelty, suicide ideation, and one panel of group sex. The squeamish may also want to be aware of a few sex scenes and nonsexual images of male nudity. Impressively, none of it feels gratuitous, and it all goes to inform Charles-Henri's character. Apocryphal history tells us that he wasn't pleased to have to take up the family profession, and Sakamoto makes that the underlying theme of the work. Each section of this omnibus builds Charles-Henri's relationship to his work and overbearing grandmother while also edging us closer and closer to the fatal year of 1789. This volume ends in 1757, but like in Riyoko Ikeda's The Rose of Versailles, we can see everything building to the moment when the third estate has had enough.

That's a major triumph here. History isn't following a straight path but rather a meandering trail as Charles-Henri becomes more aware of life outside the Sanson home. Sakamoto makes use of several different meanings of the word "Innocent" that works with the pacing, and he also seems to be creating a parallel between Charles-Henri and the spelling of the family name as it appears on their crest, "Sans Son," surrounding a cracked bell. Separated into two words like that, the name means "soundless," the implication is that Charles-Henri is the embodiment of that cracked bell, unable to fulfill his ostensible purpose, or at least the way his grandmother wants him to. The book also does a remarkable job of showing the idea of execution as a performance, with each execution hosting an eager audience, delighted to see "justice" carried out before their eyes – or at least, keen to see someone die.

This is a challenging read. Even without the execution aspect, the story is harsh, and the characters are flawed, some in hateful ways. I'm not sure that this Charles-Henri Sanson is any more faithful to history than any other pop culture version, from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities to the visual novel Jeanne at the Clock Tower's take. But this is worth picking up if you like your history harsh and unrelenting.

Christopher Farris

Rating:

The reach of manga as an art form has produced some spectacularly specific indulgences for those seeking them out. So just to start, if you need a vivid, visionary, regularly depressing, and "highly romanticized" rendering of the life of Charles-Henri Sanson in the run-up to the French Revolution, well, you probably won't need another book all year besides Innocent here. My man Shin'ichi Sakamoto is back at it again, or rather, was back at it, with this omnibus collection of the first three volumes predating his latest series #DRCL which I looked at earlier for this guide. And Innocent is easily the book to behold if you want a sweeping demonstration of what a master of the craft he's established himself as.

Centering on the subject of a famed executioner leading up to the French Revolution, it should go without saying that Innocent is not for the faint of heart. But if you have the stomach for all the violence, torture, and societally unsavory elements that must accompany this, you'll find a dang-near impeccable presentation of the material. Sakamoto's glossy, pure portraits of meticulously magnificent men cut calculated contrast with all the grime and filth filling the world that eighteenth-century France was becoming, alongside the absolute swamps of blood left by these executions. There's an earnestly researched attention to the technical details of execution, alongside the kinds of medical knowledge that would necessarily be gleaned from the process. But the point of the story also doesn't shy away from the layers of psychological effects wrought by the process.

That's all in service of following the extremely enjoyably messy (and perhaps not entirely historically accurate) evolution and rise of Charles himself, a journey that's bolstered by getting to go through three volumes of it at once like this. Sakamoto's uncompromising indulgence in full-page spreads and sequences of wordless panels can make Innocent read surprisingly briskly despite its density in both art and subject matter. But it also invites you to linger on that artistry, on the fragile, destructible beauty of both its cast and the horrors it unflinchingly depicts them committing. And through it all, we can feel the primal, pulsating power of the Revolution preparing to scream forth. There are a couple of places where Sakamoto's symbolic indulgences might become just a bit too grandiose, even by the standards he's welcomed us into. But these are mere askance artistic extremes in a book that has plenty else going on to keep you engrossed. It's way more than I can commit to commenting on in a scant few paragraphs here, other than to sum up that Innocent is, in all its beautiful, horrible glory, peak comics.