Kentaro Miura: All You Need to Know About the Beserk Manga

by Will Heath | ART

Kentaro Miura is a manga artist most famous for his long-running manga series Berserk, a deeply detailed and bleak fantasy story about a lone swordsman named Guts. Miura is something of a legend within the manga world, with Berserk having been adapted to anime twice, twenty years apart: once in 1997, and again in 2017. But neither of these shows does his manga justice, and that’s thanks to his unique approach to drawing which is his alone, and cannot be replicated in any other medium. There’s nobody quite like Kentaro Miura!

Who is Kentaro Miura?

What we know about Miura’s life and habits points to a man who has never done, nor ever wanted to do, anything except draw manga. The evidence for this comes from Miura’s childhood. At the age of ten, Miura created his own manga series, Miuranger (a clever mix of his own name and the English word ranger, which is a very ten-year-old-boy move). This manga is hyper detailed, beautifully realised, and demonstrates an artist’s hand far more mature than his age. It also spanned a whopping 40 volumes, though was never serialised publicly since he was a child.

Just one year later, Miura wrote another manga series, Ken e no Michi (The Way of the Sword). And so, he was clearly on a roll. If Miura showed this much promise, ambition, and raw talent at the age of ten, he was always going to be a success. And when he was just 22 years old he began writing Berserk, the manga he is now famous for across the world. In terms of longevity and scale alone, Miura’s work, dedication, and legacy are all on par with those of Japan’s most famous mangaka, One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda.

As a man, Miura is a very solitary figure. It’s quite hard to even find a decent photo of the guy. There’s a lot of his famous protagonist Guts in him, and that is, of course, by design. Miura has been making Berserk for years and it just keeps on going. But what, exactly, is Berserk?

Berserk: What is it and Why is it so Popular?

Berserk (or Beruseruku) has been in publication since 1989 and is still running to this day (though with frequent and long hiatuses). On the surface, Berserk is an intensely raw, gritty, and dark fantasy epic. Underneath, it is an introspective and considered character study about a solitary, morally grey man struggling with his demons and his past, in an ongoing journey across the world.

The manga is set in a bleak fantasy world with aesthetic leanings towards the Western medieval fantasy style, complete with stone castles, siege engines, and rusty armour. Its primary focus is its protagonist, a man known only as Guts. Guts is a very complex protagonist whose personality, motivations, and actions are heavily informed by a childhood raised in a band of brutal, uncaring, violent mercenaries. Throughout the story we see frequent shows of kindness and friendship from Guts, but just as many heartless choices made and sadistic actions taken.

The beauty of the Berserk manga commes from how Miura realises its world through his art. While most fantasy worlds, like those of Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire rely on context to slowly and steadily build their world - which includes landscapes, architecture, language, food, economics, politics, fashion, the list goes on - Miura draws all of this. His writing is saved for, and concerned with, the dialogue and story surrounding Guts, while the world itself is presented to us through painstakingly detailed artwork.

In fact, Berserk is more known to passing observers and potential fans by its art than by its characters. This is why no anime has ever done the manga justice. Miura has a particular eye for detail. His panels, however big or small, overflow with dizzying amounts of detail that breathe so much life into his characters’ expressions, the clothes they wear, the rugged landscape of the world, the economic struggles of its people, and the food they eat. With a world this meticulously designed, and executed so flawlessly by considered and beautiful artwork, it’s no wonder Berserk suffers from the occasional hiatus.

The story of Guts begins with him being born of a woman hanged from a tree, and rescued by the wife of a mercenary who then dies only three years later. The aforementioned mercenary who raises Guts to manhood is her husband, a man named Gambino who despises and ends up selling the boy. Guts eventually joins a mercenary band of his own, the Band of the Hawk, led by Griffith, a young man with an almost unnatural level of ambition. Berserk has continued on for more than thirty years, and to cover any more story here would be spoiling things. But the world gets dark, and we haven’t even covered the monsters and demons Guts later confronts. There are few fantasy worlds as bleak as that of Berserk.

You can get hold of a copy of Berserk for yourself, available on Amazon here. If you’re a fan of horror in manga then you should also check out Junji Ito: 10 Best Stories from Japan’s Master of Horror!

Influences on Kentaro Miura’s Art

It’s been established by now that Miura’s meticulously layered and detailed art is what sets him apart, but his influence for this comes from a place which, at first, seems unexpected but, when you put their work side-by-side, it makes complete and total sense. Miura’s art, as the man himself has explained, was heavily inspired by the aesthetic style of Dutch woodcut and lithograph artist M.C. Escher. There are homages to Escher’s works dotted through the Berserk manga, but it goes deeper than that. Miura’s approach to Berserk is almost an attempt to recreate Escher’s woodcut style in manga form.

While Escher is heavily known for his mathematical art pieces that build on geometric shapes that trick the eye and create world-and-mind-bending puzzles, you don’t see a lot of that side of Escher in Berserk, aside from the aforementioned homages. It’s not Escher's world that inspired the Berserk art but rather Escher’s own hand. His art is almost entirely monochromatic, given that it’s almost all woodcut. And every Escher piece is overflowing with intense and incredible detail. While a lot of traditional Japanese art is much about space as it is the lines and colours that the artist puts down, Miura shows little of that approach in his art. Instead, he fills every single bit of available space with lines and shading that deepen the world to black and create a very oppressive, overwhelming atmosphere.

In his character design, there is also evidence of an influence by H.R. Giger, the Swiss artist responsible for the Xenomorph from Ridley Scott’s Alien film franchise. The deeply textured and surreal style of Giger’s, which has a kind of biotechnological theme, can also be seen in many of Miura’s most twisted and strange creations.

© Buronson and Tetsuo Hara, Fist of the North Star

As for manga that have inspired Miura, the most clear and notable example is the iconic post-apocalyptic manga series Fist of the North Star, created by Buronson and Tetsuo Hara. This manga wrapped just as Berserk was about to enter publication. In fact, shortly after Berserk began, Miura teamed up with Buronson to create a manga known as King of Wolves (Ourou). The similarities between Guts and Kenshiro, in both physical design and personality, are more than pronounced.

To explore more of Japanese greatest manga artists, take a look at 10 Best Female Manga Artists You Need to Know.

The Legacy of Beserk Manga

Berserk has had a colossal impact on the world of Japanese media, from recent manga to anime and even video games. In fact, it was my love for the Dark Souls video game series that led me to read Berserk in the first place. Let’s start with the trends that Berserk set in the world of Japanese games and anime.

Since the 1990s it’s been a popular trope within the world of games and anime to have a protagonist with an almost comically oversized sword. The most notable example of this is Cloud, protagonist of 1997’s Final Fantasy VII, as well as that same game’s antagonist Sephiroth. This trend of stoic men with big swords can be seen in anime and manga like Bleach, Naruto, Ruroni Kenshin, and Fairy Tale. In fact, there are few tropes more pronounced in anime than oversized swords, and it all began with Guts.

A similar trend set by Guts, though also by the previously mentioned Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star, is that of the stoic loner, usually male, usually with intense emotional baggage. You can see these kinds of protagonists in Death Note, Re: Zero, Goblin Slayer, Sword Art Online, and even anime like Code Geass and Neon Genesis Evangelion. These characters are often clad in black, dislike forming human connections, and prefer isolation. Guts was one of the first, and with him Miura set a trend that continues to this day.

Nothing has been influenced by Berserk in such an all-encompassing way as has FromSoftware’s Dark Souls video game series. Berserk is most easily identified by its brutally gruesome monster designs, monsters which populate the brutal and dark landscape of the manga. These monsters can also be seen in the Dark Souls games. Dragons, trolls, goblins, and other fantasy creatures. Though these, in both Berserk and Dark Souls, are drawn with deformities and grotesque details like the naked body of a woman atop the enormous body of a flaming spider, or a dragon whose entire torso is a gaping maw lined with man-sized teeth.

The influences of Berserk go beyond just FromSoftware’s creature designs. In 2015’s Bloodborne, the protagonist is branded with something known as the Hunter’s Mark. A very similar mark is branded on Guts’ neck and plays a key role in the story of Berserk. A fan favourite character in the Dark Souls series is a friendly and positive knight wearing ‘onion’ armour. His design is nearly identical to that of a knight created by Miura in Berserk. And then there is the richly detailed medieval European fantasy aesthetic of isolated castles, knights in heavy armour wielding enormous swords, and dense woodland areas haunted by strange and terrifying ghosts and monsters.

Berserk: Deluxe Edition, Volume 1, available at Amazon

Miura and Berserk have had a colossal impact on Japanese manga, anime, and video games for years, and nothing demonstrates Miura’s legacy better than how he has inspired the art and stories of other talented creators.

Fans of Berserk may be interested in the hardcover deluxe version of volume 1 available on Amazon here!

March 27, 2020 | Art

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