Kentaro Miura, a Japanese manga artist famously known for his dark fantasy series Berserk, started it in 1989 and kept creating until he passed away.
By 2021, Berserk had sold over 50 million copies and became one of the top-selling manga series. On May 6, 2021, Miura died due to acute aortic dissection (publicly announced on May 20, 2021), at just the age of 54. But he left his iconic work which is well known for its intense seinen storytelling.
His creation of Berserk is dark and dangerous, where Guts and his friends confront demons, knights, and sorcerers. Despite the darkness, there’s excitement and wonder in their journey which is loved by all.
The Challenge Kentarou Miura Faced While Creating Berserk
Kentaro Miura drew inspiration from various sources, including movies like Hellraiser and The Name of the Rose (because he had a long-standing appreciation for M.C. Escher’s work). In addition, Berserk was also influenced by Grimms’ Fairy Tales and so on.
He has given a number of interviews since the inception of Berserk. But Fandom created a proper compilation of all the interviews. So, in one of the questions when it was asked to the creator about martial arts scenes in Berserk, he replied:
“I like it very much but I haven’t collected much material for it. I just have some images of samurai and knights. When it comes to action scenes, I want to draw them realistically. A harmony of reality and fabrication.”
He addressed the challenges of harmonizing the martial arts tactics into reality:
“But it is hard to harmonize them. As for the image of Guts and the image of the sword he uses, sometimes he crushes small objects with one slash. In this case, I think there’s no real sword-fighting skill that matches it exactly.”
No doubt, when it comes to action scenes, he aimed for a balance between reality and fabrication. But the difficulty of finding a real-world sword-fighting skill that exactly matches the extraordinary abilities of the characters — such as Guts crushing small objects with a single sword slash — is a hard nut to crack. The main uphill battle was there was no documented martial arts where one used such a huge sword like Guts.
How Did Kentaro Miura Overcome The Challenge He Faced While Creating Berserk?
After addressing the challenges Kentaro Miura then went up to say how he had a light-bulb moment to solve this crux of the matter.
The creator explained that he aimed to strike the best balance between informative manga about martial arts and animations featuring machines. He put “priority on images” over detailed martial arts information.
He mentioned examples like Hokuto no Ken (which followed Hokuto Shinken style), where exaggerated actions like sky-high jumps might be too much, but “poking enemies and they explode” could work. Miura also humorously admitted that he had no idea about things after that but he did it.
Source: Fandom
