Earlier this year I began experimenting with the medium of weekly Japanese manga. Though Western comics have always seemed a bore to me, I'm a fan of both art, and novels, so why not graphic novels? I ended up exploring a classic of the medium (Berserk), a contemporary favorite (Boku no Hero Academia), and a genre favorite (a graphic novella by horror savant Junji Ito).I read almost universal praise for Berserk but was greeted with the first volume, which I promptly hated. It read like a 16-year old boy's etching done while in high school math class. Flat characters, rough artwork, and terrible dialogue. Upon further internet trawling I discovered that, in fact, Miura was no more than a teenager when he had written and illustrated the material in this first volume from the late '80s, and is still working on the series today — Now in his 50s.
His fans suggested I keep reading, and so I obliged them and continued to give the series a shot.
It wasn't until around Volume 15 that I actually put the series down for good, recognizing that it did, in fact, improve drastically; both in the areas of art and characterization. The dialogue remained universally awful, though whether that was due to its original construction or shoddy translation, I'm not sure. The series peaked for me around volume 9, when the characters were further humanized and experienced an emotional, existential breakthrough.
Miura is at his best when he's building his characters and utilizing the plot to challenge them. I once had a creative writing professor suggest cruelty towards your characters as the best way to challenge them and force them to grow and change, and Miura certainly pulls no punches in the Martin-esque way that he punishes the poor souls in Berserk. It leads to unexpected depth in the characterization that I've been referring to, something I was not expecting when I picked up manga for the first time.
The art grows in leaps and bounds through just the volumes that I read, and I've peeked ahead at some of the art in the volume that released just this past year and was blown away. The art Miura is producing currently is genre-defying, in my estimation. He's drawing inspiration from Western artists such as Bosch and Escher, and producing some art completely unique to his medium. It's something that deserves recognition and provides a significant boost to the quality of Berserk in general.
I think a most specific, make-or-break facet in the estimation of whether or not a reader would enjoy Berserk is how well they like camp. Berserk is full of camp. Whether it's intentional, or Miura is just trying to too hard to be edgy is anybody's guess. But this series is chock full of gratuitous, over-the-top nudity and violence. I really can't stress this enough. I'm all for realism (I love Martin's ASOIAF, which toes the line between realism and outright camp fairly well, in my opinion), but the levels of explicit sexual content and violence are so over-the-top in this work that they're impossible to take seriously. I'd be shocked if Miura wasn't inspired by a wave of ultraviolent '80s slasher B-movies. If this is your thing, then you'll probably like Berserk, but too often I felt Miura was overly ham-handed in his presentation of this camp, and it contrasted poorly with some of the more serious character work he was clearly putting full effort into producing. When I think about Berserk, I feel a clash between outright ridiculousness, and earnest exploration of existentialism through well-rounded characters. It's an odd juxtaposition that could have been more interesting had it been balanced more skillfully.
The one objective complaint I have about Berserk is that the dialogue is bad. As I mentioned before, this may be due to the translation, as I don't envy the Japanese-to-English translators job in any circumstance, much less when they're trying to fit kanji-to-English into tiny speech bubbles. I'm sure sacrifices needed to be made to get Miura's ideas across, and they serve Berserk very badly. There are numerous instances of awful dialogue that tear you right out of the experience and pile on top of the already troubled mash of campiness and serious attempts at character development.
The best thing I can say about the series is that, coming from a background of Western fiction, it was almost wholly unique to me. The plotting was a rollercoaster -- each time I suspected what was going to happen next, I was wrong. Similarly, the increase in quality of the character writing and art was unexpected. Fans of the series where definitely correct in urging me to stick with it past the first few volumes, and I'm glad I did. However, this just falls solidly into the category of "not for me": I recognize the special things that the series does within its medium, but as somebody who isn't a fan of the medium, has nary a campy bone in his body, and doesn't care much for fantasy, this falls flatly outside the boxes I typically tick when examining what my favorite pieces of fiction are.Berserk does some things so well, but its flaws — along with the fact that it's simply not my thing — kept dragging it back down for me.
This is likely much more enjoyable to fans of manga, camp, and dark fantasy. but for people like me coming from outside those realms, much less so. For example, I chuckle to think about my grandmother picking up and reading one of these. But its reputation is, in my layman's opinion, well-deserved among manga fans.
I am certainly not an expert in this subgenre, but hopefully I've nailed a general outline well-enough to help somebody make an informed decision.
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