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▪ | RELEASED BY: | DARK HORSE | ||
| ▪ | AUTHOR / ART: | KENTARO MIURA | |||
| ▪ | FORMAT: | JAPANESE / B&W | |||
| ▪ | PAGES: | 224 | |||
| ▪ | RATING: | 18+ | |||
| ▪ | RELEASE DATE: | 10/01/2008 | |||
| ▪ | REVIEW DATE: | 10/14/2008 | |||
| ▪ | REVIEWED BY: | SCOTT CAMPBELL |
From the back cover: “Created by Kentaro Miura, Berserk is a crashing manga leviathan, a perfect storm of impassioned action, impious horror, and improper humour that makes your most twisted nightmares play like treasured childhood memories.”
Berserk is a mixed bag to say the least, but that should be taken in a good way, not a bad way. Berserk is “out there” and visually astounding in a lot of very normal, and also very unique ways – it has a shifting balance that is hard to describe, but it works for this series extremely well. The deep, dark places that this manga travels to both in story and in artistic expression can be as interesting and captivating as they are horrifying. There aren’t too many other stories or manga quite like Berserk – most people that really like it swear by it, and are willing to spend the slightly higher price that this manga is sold at in comparison to most others on the market these days. Berserk is the hammer of the manga forge, a white-hot amalgam of bruising action, breathless horror, and brimstone humour that separates the men from the boys, so to speak. It also separates the heads from plenty of shoulders… but I digress.
In volume twenty-five, trolls are afoot – and they aren’t the semi-pleasant, bright-haired kind… they’re the nasty, bloodthirsty kind. Guts the Black Swordsman just can't seem to find a little peace. On his way to the idyllic tranquility of his miniature pal Puck's homeland of Elfhelm, Guts and his companions, at the behest of a local witch, assist a village beset by a plague of hideous and deadly trolls. Assisted by the witch's disciple, Schierke, the warrior band manages to turn the tide against the beasts, but when a monstrous ogre hits town, a tide of another kind is needed, a mystic flood to wash the town clean. But when Casca and Farnese are carried away by the flood, they become prisoners in the troll's den, where a fate far worse than any imaginable death awaits.
The visuals in this series continue to astound – the painstaking detail put into much of the art is always such a joy to look over a second time before you turn each page. . You just can’t know what “attention to detail” means until you read Berserk – it’s rare when it comes to what it has to offer to all the readers out there, so really it’s no wonder that it stands out as much as it does. Besides that, the art and story continues to contain some pretty “out there” gore and violence. Berserk has never tried to skip out on the realities (or and fantasies for that matter…) of violence and the darker side of things. Berserk certainly isn’t for everyone – it earns it’s 18+ rating quite diligently with everything from gory violence, to nudity, to some really frightening visions of death and hell and everything that could possibly be described as “Wow, you can’t talk about that in polite company” etc. But for the mature reader that can clearly see the line between what is just a story in a book and what is real within our own world, it can be wholly entertaining (though not always wholesome!). Berserk is rare for a fantasy series in many ways, and most readers will see all of them as a positive set of attributes. If any of this sounds like you, don’t miss out on at least giving this fine series a chance to show you what it has to offer.
IN SUMMARY:
Berserk is first and foremost unique – it is unique in artistic quality, story, genre, and subject matter. It’s certainly not for the faint of heart, but everyone else is all too likely to enjoy this peculiar ride whole-heartedly!
