Berserk, the best selling manga by Kentaro Miura, is big in Japan and since it launched from Dark Horse in 2003 it’s been a solid hit here with more than 1.2 million copies sold. That makes it one of the most successful seinen (older male) manga series ever in the US. After a three year hiatus, a new volume, #38 is coming up in July, so the saga continues.
While the successes of Viz, Yen and Kodansha with keeping up the Manga game in the US publishing world are often mentioned, Dark Horse has also been a consistent player, probably because of publishing numbers like that.
The manga features the adventures of Guts, the Black Swordsman, who wanders a prototypical landscape of post apocalyptic mayhem and violence. “Kentaro Miura’s Berserk is a harrowing dark fantasy of monumental depth, complexity, and audacity, and its astonishing visual tapestry is like nothing else in graphic fiction,” said Dark Horse’s Berserk editor, Chris Warner in a statement. “While the horror and violence are at times disturbing and unquestionably adult, Miura still manages to produce genuine emotion and plenty of humor.”
In the new volume:
Guts and company head to the isle of Skellig in hopes that elven magic can cure the afflicted Casca, but the cure could come at a deadly cost. Meanwhile, Guts’s Band of the Hawk comrade Rickert journeys to the city of Falconia, the seat of power for Griffith, the resurrected former Hawks commander. But the glittering towers of Falconia cast the darkest of shadows, and a legion of demonic monstrosities dwell in the darkness!
Dark Horse sent out a few sedate preview pages, but in case you’re wondering, here’s some vintage Miura:
Berserk is such a beautiful book. The action is tense, the monsters are horrific, and the adventure is great. Sadly, the first volume of the book is by far the weakest, with an opening sequence not at all representative of the rest of the series. I’m glad to see Berserk’s return.
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