Almost every mangaka tends to create a specific quality in their protagonists that draws parallels between the main character and the mangaka. However, this was not the case with Kentaro Miura and his masterpiece, Berserk. Miura, once in an interview, revealed that the character that replicated him the most was Pippin.
Pippin was one of the members of the Band of Falcons who helped Guts escape. He did not speak much, but whenever he did, it would either be a serious discussion or to offer some advice. Pippin had a good relationship with Guts in the series, and the two were called the power duo of Berserk.
According to Miura, when he planned Berserk, he initially thought of only five characters for the series and all of them were based on his friends. However, there were no Guts, Griffith, or Casca in his friend circle, which meant that he only planned the secondary characters from his series.
Kentaro Miura Based The First Five Characters of Berserk on His Friends
Yukari Fujimoto interviewed Miura in 2000, and this interview was later translated by Mangabrog. During the interview, Fujimoto asked Miura about the idea of Berserk and how he managed to create such a great character list for his series. Miura explained that he was initially making up the story as he went forward, and he had only planned five characters.
Miura stated:
As I remember it now, all I’d really decided at the time was that there’d be about five characters, and I’d make them similar to five of my friends.
He further added:
Pretty much. The only difference is, there aren’t any Griffiths or Guts in our group. There really was a guy similar to Judeau. We had a Corkus too, and a Rickert. There’s no Casca, though, since it was a group of guys.
The characters that were based on his friends were Judeau, Corkus, Rickert, and Pippin. All of these characters were part of the original Band of Falcons. He also explained that he didn’t plan for Casca and Guts to end up together, but later on, he understood the dramatic element of their relationship and thus added it to the story.
Kentaro Miura Saw Himself in Pippin
While talking about his friends being the inspiration for many secondary characters in the series, Kentaro Miura revealed that the character that he based on himself was Pippin. Pippin shared a resemblance to the Yellow Ranger from Super Sentai. He believed that in his friend circle, he played the role of Pippin.
Miura stated:
And then Pippin is me, in terms of physical appearance. The yellow ranger, basically. I’m pretty sure that was the role I played. On the inside, though — and maybe manga artists tend to idealize themselves, but — I would have Guts-like thoughts, or Griffith-like thoughts.
Talking about the freedom of creating characters in manga, Miura further pointed out:
Manga is a funny thing: rather than taking base models and inserting them into your manga unchanged, you can do things like break the models up and rearrange their different parts into all sorts of strange things.
Miura explained that manga offers the freedom to break a model and use it for different elements of the story, rather than being limited to using it as a base model.
This is why the characters can be easily based on more than one inspiration, and it would still work out for the narrative.
You can read the Berserk manga on Dark Horse.
