 | | ▪ | RELEASED BY: | | DARK HORSE | | | ▪ | AUTHOR / ART: | | KENTARO MIURA | | | ▪ | FORMAT: | | JAPANESE / B&W | | | ▪ | PAGES: | | 224 | | | ▪ | RATING: | | 18+ | | | ▪ | RELEASE DATE: | | 01/28/2009 | | | ▪ | REVIEW DATE: | | 04/09/2009 | | | ▪ | REVIEWED BY: | | SCOTT CAMPBELL |
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-seven, new armour means new business… and business is good! Now equipped with the mystical Berserker Armour, Guts fights on against the dragon-form of Grunbeld and his legion of fanatic apostle soldiers. But the very armour that holds Guts together - in a nightmarishly literal sense - might be the last straw that tears his tortured mind apart! While Guts struggles to hold his own against his inner demons, monsters of a very different sort rally in Windham as the Kushan Emperor, Ganishka, and the newly reborn Griffith rally their forces in a head-to-head struggle for control of all of Midland. But when the dust finally settles, there may be little left of the kingdom to claim! People who read reviews of Berserk must get tired of hearing: “Yeah, and this volume was crazy – crazy, crazy things happened because it was so crazy.” But honestly, Berserk is pretty “crazy” and crazy things happen every volume like a freakish nightmare on speed. The grotesque and often frightening imagery comes from a mind heavy with creativity, but a dark creativity with a unique edge to it. That is Berserk at it’s heart – the intensity of it’s unique nightmarish quality is its soul. So like always, you’re going to love it or you’re going to hate it, because it’s just that “crazy.” So that brings us to the visual style. 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. Also, some pretty crazy monstrosities are detailed in volume twenty-seven, and anyone who reads Berserk can appreciate a horrific monstrosity or two. And Berserk is a mix of genres for sure – it’s set in a medieval type world, but with all the fantasy elements like demons and monsters and magic. It could be loosely described as fantasy/horror, but really there’s so much more to it, but you’ll just have to read it to understand. Berserk certainly isn’t for everyone though – 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 in-between. Berserk is no holds barred when it comes to expression through violence and the darker side of things, but that doesn’t make it “garbage” by any means – it really does have an amazing story and intricate characters and motivations – it’s just a very “mature” book for mature readers only. 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! But who needs wholesome all the time? Enough said.
IN SUMMARY:
Berserk is epic in scope, and as violent as it gets (unless you read MPD-Psycho, but that’s another story…) – it’s a true delight for the mature reader of manga. Unbelievable art with a unique sense of style plummet the story through the very depths of hell and back again. Are you in? |
