How did Kentaro Miura start drawing manga?

Miura began drawing manga in elementary school, part of a circle of friends in Chiba who made their own comics and read everything. The friendship matters to the biography: Kouji Mori, who would become a professional manga artist himself and decades later supervise Berserk's continuation, was in that circle from high school, and the two encouraged each other's ambitions from the start.

His professional debut came at eighteen. Futatabi, a science fiction short, was published in Weekly Shonen Magazine in 1985, and a second short, Noa, followed the same year. Neither became a series, but they put a teenage Miura in print at a major publisher while he went on to study at Nihon University's art department, the formal training visible later in Berserk's anatomy, architecture and classical composition.

After university he took the classic apprenticeship step, briefly assisting George Morikawa, the creator of Hajime no Ippo. The stint was short but it placed him inside a working weekly studio at exactly the moment he was developing his own project. In 1988 he drew the Berserk prototype, a complete short version of Guts' story, which won notice and opened the door at Hakusensha.

Berserk began in the magazine Monthly Animal House in 1989 and moved with its successor, Young Animal, in 1992. Between the prototype and the series, Miura also drew the historical works King of Wolves and its sequel Japan with writer Buronson, the Fist of the North Star co creator, collaborations covered in this hub's early works entry. By 1990 the road in was complete: the schoolboy circle had produced a professional with a series, a publisher and a world.