What is Giganto Maxia?

Giganto Maxia ran in Young Animal from 2013 to 2014 and fills one collected volume. It was notable before a page was read: it was Miura's first new original series since Berserk began, a quarter century earlier, and readers opened it to answer a genuine question, what would this artist draw if he drew something else.

The story is set a hundred years after a great destruction, in an age of myth. Delos, a huge hearted wrestler, travels with Prome, a girl with mysterious powers, through lands ruled by giant creatures and the peoples who worship or resist them. The influences Miura wore openly, ancient myth, giant monster stories and his love of wrestling's physical theater, combine into something closer to a fable than to Berserk's grim campaign.

The drawing is the argument for the book. Freed from Berserk's continuity, Miura fills the short run with enormous creatures, insectoid armies, desert cities and crowd scenes, all in the dense mature style of the later Berserk volumes. Because the series is complete in a single volume, it is also the most approachable Miura book for a new reader to finish, a fact booksellers and this Library both note.

Giganto Maxia was reissued in Japan in 2021 alongside Duranki, in the months after Miura's death, when Hakusensha gathered his short works for the audience that had grown around Berserk. In this hub it sits with Duranki as the pair of short series that frame the epic: one drawn by Miura alone, one by the studio he built.