What is Duranki?

Duranki launched in September 2019 in Young Animal Zero, a Hakusensha magazine, and its credits were the news: original work by Kentaro Miura, art by Studio Gaga. Miura conceived the story, designed the characters and directed the production, while his trained assistants produced the finished manga, the first time his studio had carried a series under its own name.

The story draws on Mesopotamian mythology. Its hero, Usumgallu, is a child who is neither fully human nor god, raised in a mountain village and drawn into the world of the gods and their wonders. The setting let Miura work in a different register from Berserk: sunlit, ancient and wondrous rather than medieval and grim, though the drawing, dense, researched and architectural, is unmistakably from the same studio.

Duranki ran only a short course of chapters before Miura's death in May 2021 ended it, and its single collected volume appeared in Japan in December 2021, published alongside a new edition of his other short series, Giganto Maxia. Its brevity makes it a footnote in page count and a central document in this hub, because it is the proof of concept for everything Studio Gaga later attempted with Berserk itself.

Read Duranki with the Studio Gaga entry in this hub and the continuation entry beside it. Together they explain the most unusual succession in modern manga: an artist who spent his last years building the team, and the test series, that would outlive him on his own famous book.