Which Young Animal issues have Berserk on the cover?
Seven covers, verified, across twenty-nine years.
Berserk chapters have appeared in hundreds of magazine issues since 1989, but a Berserk cover is a different thing. Young Animal usually gives its cover to photography or to another series in the issue. A cover drawn by Kentaro Miura, with Berserk as the issue’s face, is the exception, and it clusters where you would expect: the launch years, a film release, a return from hiatus, a farewell.
Every cover below was checked against the cover itself: the art, the issue number, and the date are all printed on it.
THE VERIFIED COVERS
Young Animal · 1992 to 2021
Young Animal · 1992 No. 11
Berserk’s Young Animal debut, cover dated October 23, 1992, priced 240 yen (~$2). The cover line promises the legend starts here, and the chapter inside opens in colour across forty pages.
Young Animal · 1993 No. 1
A single face fills the first cover of 1993: Guts, mid-shout, with the Berserk masthead worked into the hair. The new-year issue of a magazine still introducing itself.
Young Animal · 1993 No. 9
The “Mad Warrior” cover: Guts in the red cloak with the great sword over one shoulder, sold as the magazine’s total-offensive issue.
Young Animal · 1993 No. 21
Guts in full plate and helmet under the Berserk title, late 1993: the third Berserk-led cover in the magazine’s second year.
Young Animal · 2012 No. 3
Painted for the first Golden Age film, in cinemas February 4, 2012: Guts and Griffith share a cover for the first time in years, and the serialisation resumes the same issue.
Young Animal · 2019 No. 9–10
A combined double issue with Guts carrying the right half of the cover and a lead colour chapter inside: by 2019 a Berserk cover is an event, not a habit.
Young Animal · 2021 No. 18
The memorial issue, September 10, 2021. Miura’s ink drawing of Guts takes the whole cover. Inside: episode 364, his last chapter, and a booklet of messages to him from other artists.
WHAT THIS LIST IS NOT
The honest edges of the censusNot a chapter count
Berserk ran inside far more issues than it fronted. Absence from this gallery means the cover belonged to someone else that fortnight, not that Berserk was absent.
The Animal House years
Berserk began in Monthly Animal House (1989 to 1992) before Young Animal existed. No Berserk-led Animal House cover could be verified from the sources opened for this page, so none is shown. That is a gap in our evidence, and the page says so rather than filling it.
Mentions are not covers
Young Animal 2018 No. 5, for example, plugs Berserk in a corner of a cover led by another series. A plug is not a Berserk cover, and it is excluded by the same rule that admits the seven above.