What was Kentaro Miura's early manga before Berserk?
Miura's first published manga were two 1985 shorts for Weekly Shonen Magazine: Futatabi, a science fiction story, and Noa, which followed soon after. Both are apprentice works by a teenager, but they already show the interests that stayed: ruined worlds, lone figures and drawing that reaches past what the page count can hold. Neither was collected widely, and both are mostly read today in discussions of his career rather than in print.
The famous early work is the Berserk prototype of 1988, a 48 page version of Guts' story drawn before the series existed. It contains the Black Swordsman, a version of the giant sword and the dark world, in younger and rougher form, and it is reprinted in Berserk volume 14, which makes it the most accessible of all his early manga and the best single document of how the series began.
Between the prototype and Berserk's early arcs, Miura drew two historical works with Buronson, the writer famous for Fist of the North Star: King of Wolves (Ourou, 1989), about a Japanese historian lost in the Mongolia of Genghis Khan, and Japan (1992), set in a future where Japan has sunk beneath the sea. Both pair Miura's already formidable drawing with a veteran writer's hard edged plotting, and both were stepping stones in craft and standing.
After Berserk took over his life there was no room for another early shelf, which is why these few titles carry so much interest. They are gathered and discussed in this hub because they show the artist before the epic: the prototype especially belongs beside the art evolution entry, as page one of the thirty year comparison.
