Berserk! A Game of Thrones manga style.

"Oh dark act, violation, murder! Abyss, give birth to the unredeemed. Who is our redeemer? Who our leader? Where are the ways through black wastes? God, do not abandon us! What are you summoning, God? Raise your hand up to the darkness above you, pray, despair, wring your hands, kneel, press your forehead into the dust, cry out, but do not name Him, do not look at Him. " C.G. Jung, The Red Book

At the moment of the eclipse, the God Hand rises. Despair humans!

Summary: Still ongoing after two decades, the manga epic Berserk, by Kentarou Miura, continues to be relevant to this day with popularity in both Japan and across the world. Set in a medieval fantasy universe, the manga resonates with various mythological sources including elements of Greek tragedy, Jungian imagery, Lovecraftian horror, and Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian, plus a bit of Michael Moorcock's doomed eternal champion.

Recently, a new movie trilogy renewed interest though with some mixed reviews due to its heavy use of CGI and massive editing from the expansive source material; personally, I thought the movies worked pretty well to get the main themes across even though a lot will be confusing to newcomers.  Warning: this manga (and anime) is not for the squeamish or those with a low tolerance for gore and nudity. A literal film adaptation of the manga would be NC-17, at least.

In manga, there is nothing new about the cursed swordsman who wanders the land seeking revenge or redemption, especially since figures such as Ogami Itto set forth on his path to hell many years ago. Berserk can be considered the ultimate distillation of the rage-fueled search for vengeance in an unjust cosmos as the Black Swordsman, Guts, travels a world that seems to be out to get him.

Guts

His origin story is suitably mythic in scope. Born from a hanging corpse, Guts is given a singular curse: the unquenchable will to live. This does not bring him any happiness as he is adopted by a mercenary leader and his mistress who soon falls to the plague. Thereafter, Guts is branded as a bad omen, treated cruelly by his adoptive mercenary father who trains him for front line combat from the age of six. Knowing only the horrors of battle, Guts sets forth into a brutal medieval landscape, himself brutalized yet somehow keeping his basic humanity intact. The author pulls absolutely no punches in depicting the depravity of such a world, including rape of both genders, wholesale slaughter and unmitigated betrayal that would make George R.R. Martin chuckle.

The manga introduces us to the doomed hero by way of bracketing his backstory with a flash-forward to an even darker time in his evolution. Bitter, hounded by demons, and fueled only by his berserker rage, Guts is a rather unpleasant fellow at first, until you see the broken horror in his one good eye as he tries to keep his sanity together despite everything the cruel world has thrown at him. The author uses a fairy named Puck (yes, the flying and dust sprinkling kind) in order to lighten the oppressive mood with humor. Puck also serves as an impromptu Greek chorus, voice of the author, and pseudo-narrator who occasionally breaks the fourth wall to speak to and for the audience. How you feel about Puck may affect your ultimate enjoyment of this story. Personally, I tolerated the little fool, though he becomes more useful later in the narrative. 

A Prophecy of doom.

We gradually see, from the initial arc, the rationale for Guts cynicism and his attempts to avoid other people: it's just not good for anyone's health. Branded with a cursed rune on his neck, Guts has been fated to die, as payment for a sacrifice he didn't volunteer to be but ended up holding the receipt for anyways. The universe of Berserk is run by higher powers who resemble the unredeemable horrors of Lovecraft, yet the tale is not wholly nihilistic.

One of the major arcs, "Lost Children", sets the authors moral tone for the epic: our own human failings lay the seeds of our destruction, not the elder gods themselves. Miura is clearly aware of the true nature of the classic fairy tale: dark warnings to children not to stray else they meet a gruesome fate.

Similarly, a long segment involving an Inquisition seems, at first, to be another criticism of popular religious faith, but it's a deeper testament to the failings and hypocrisy of human desire. The pagans who are pilloried are just as depraved and evil as the brutal Inquisitors who put them to the rack. All become sacrifices to a self-serving witless soul who throws them all into the Void for someone else's ends. This recurring theme forms the basis of Miura's scathing, yet somehow compassionate, critique of the human problem: how sad we are, how weak, how cowardly as we throw ourselves to a fate of our own, ultimate, choosing--idolizing gods, heroes, saviors, and demons to save us from ourselves as we willingly sacrifice others in their name.

Just another day of hopeless odds for Guts.

Guts, despite all odds, represents a human who desires to stand on his own two feet. His road is the hardest of them all but perhaps the only one that doesn't require trampling on a mountain of skulls (well, maybe just a hill instead). As a berserker warrior, Guts is constantly challenged by the loss of his humanity, eventually made literal in the form of magical armor that allows him to face the bigger foes. Much like Elric's accursed demon sword, Stormbringer, Gut's fate seems tied to yet another bad trade: save humanity or save oneself.


The art is suitably graphic with spreads that are splashed with black ink and meticulous detail. Some of the more epic scenes are jaw-droppingly rendered with a panoply of grandiose imagery straight out of Hieronymous Bosch (who is given his due in an overt way in at least one panel). Every time you think the author has topped himself, some other sequence of both majesty and horror unveils itself. However, in the later arcs, this routine does fatigue after a bit and the story begins to meander with elements of humor and lighter fantasy that seem to dilute the earlier, grimmer, tone of the narrative; however, I find this to be a relief since 37 volumes of unmitigated gloom would be rather unpleasant to wade through.

In any case, this post will not discuss the major plot points or the character arcs, as I leave that delight up to you, the reader, if you so choose to discover the dark adventure that is Berserk. Published in the US by Dark Horse Comics.

Shout out to Hieronymous Bosch