Today is a sad day in the world of anime & manga.
Hakusensha, the publisher whose magazine Young Animal featured Berserk since it began, confirmed that author Kentaro Miura passed away on May 6 due to a ruptured aorta.
Born in Chiba City in 1966, Miura's manga career began at the fresh age of 10 with a series called Miuranger, published in a school magazine. Its popularity led to him starting another series in 1977, Ken e no Michi, where he began to experiment with different drawing techniques.
As a teenager in high school, he and a few friends, including Shizuya Wazarai, had their work feature in doujinshi magazines. He went on to work as an assistant to Hajime no Ippo creator George Morikawa, who recognized his talent and said he had nothing more to teach him.
His early work Futatabi gained him entry into Nihon University in 1985 and a nomination for Best New Author in Weekly Shonen Magazine. There he had his first serialized work, known as Noa, which didn't take off at the time.
Noa
While working with Fist of the North Star author Buronson on a series called King of Wolves in 1988, Miura entered Hakusensha's ComiComi Manga-School contest with an early prototype version of Berserk. There are some significant differences between that and the final product, e.g Guts wears an eyepatch and is more of a cocky asshole than a stoic, brooding type and Vlad the Impaler's in it, but you could tell Miura had a unique vision in mind even back then. He won second place in the contest and one year later Berserk began officially in Monthly Animal House, now known as Young Animal.
Berserk: The Prototype
He collaborated with Buronson a few more times for O Roden, a sequel to King of Wolves, plus a series called Japan. But Berserk is by far his most popular and influential work, getting its first anime adaptation in 1997 and a Dreamcast game, Sword of the Berserk: Guts' Rage, in 1999, both of which Miura himself oversaw.
O Ro, AKA King of Wolves
My own experience with the series started about three years ago. As a huge Demon's Souls and Bloodborne fan (I hadn't played any of the Dark Souls by that point) I kept seeing people online making comparisons between FromSoft's games and Berserk, so I thought I'd check it out. It was one of the first physical manga I bought and before I knew it I started filling shelves with volumes of the Dark Horse editions. I remember being super hyped by the art, from the MC Escher-influenced demon realm in Griffith's first appearance and Nosferatu Zodd absolutely wrecking shit after transforming into his apostle form. Not to mention the narrative! The Black Swordsman arc has to be one of my all-time favorite examples of an in media res opening. You see this grizzled, cursed warrior fighting demons with a sword almost as big as he is and you're wondering what made him this way. Then the Golden Age arc starts and you see he was born from a fucking corpse hung up on a tree. And shit only gets worse from there.
Berserk
Guts' persistent attitude, struggling in the face of adversity and overcoming the steepest challenges through sheer determination to protect his companions, is one of the series' highlights to a lot of people, myself included. I was in a bad place at the time, hanging out with assholes I thought were my friends, and seeing Guts put aside his angst and vibing with the lads in the Band of the Hawk during the Golden Age's more lighthearted moments was surprisingly wholesome and had me wanting to build a better life for myself instead of putting up with other people's shit.
Berserk definitely isn't a series for the faint of heart, but Miura managed to touch a lot of people throughout its 32 year run. Inspiring them to work on improving themselves and power through their struggles or creating art of their own. You can see his influence not only in the Souls games but Drakengard, Dragon's Dogma, Black Clover and pretty much any dark fantasy series from Japan.
Gigantomakhia
Miura's mental and physical health caused many a hiatus over his career, much to the chagrin of fans who blamed it on his Idolmaster addiction. It was a common joke that he might die before finishing the series, hell, even he was afraid that he won't live to give it a proper conclusion according to a 2019 interview with Glénat. But man, we never imagined that would actually happen.
"When I started the series, I was less concerned with its ending than with telling a story that, in any way, would end sooner or later, but nowadays I realized that life is not eternal, it is by taking care of my health that I try to complete the series."
Unfortunately, an aortic rupture is extremely fatal and can happen spontaneously to people with existing heart conditions. The manga seemed to be gearing up to its final act, setting up some interesting stuff involving the God Hand, Skull Knight and Casca. Unless Miura left notes on how he wanted the story to end and another artist is allowed to carry on his legacy, it seems Berserk will aways remain an unfinished masterpiece.
Keep on living, fellow strugglers, and feel free to pay your respects and share your experiences with Miura's work in the comments. I don't know about you, but I'm in the mood to load up a playlist filled with Penpals, Silver Fins and Susumu Hirasawa before jumping into the manga from the very beginning.
