Who is Kentaro Miura?

Kentaro Miura was born on July 11, 1966, in Chiba, Japan. He was drawing manga as a schoolboy, published a short work called Futatabi in Weekly Shonen Magazine in 1985 while still a teenager, and studied art at Nihon University. In 1988, while working briefly as an assistant to Hajime no Ippo creator George Morikawa, he produced the 48 page Berserk prototype that contains, in rough form, the world he would spend his life drawing.

Berserk itself began serialization in 1989, moving to Hakusensha's Young Animal magazine in 1992, where it ran for the rest of his life. The story of Guts, a swordsman carrying a blade almost too large to call a sword, Griffith and the Band of the Hawk became the defining dark fantasy manga of its era: 41 volumes in Miura's lifetime, tens of millions of copies in circulation, and an influence on games, anime and fantasy art that this Library tracks in its Berserk section.

Miura's pace was as famous as his art. Chapters appeared irregularly as he pursued a density of cross hatching, architecture and crowd work that few weekly or monthly artists attempted, and he took extended breaks that he discussed frankly in interviews in terms of health and perfectionism. Around his studio he built Studio Gaga, the team of assistants he trained in his own techniques, and with them he also produced the short series Duranki, which he originated and directed.

Miura died on May 6, 2021, at 54, of an acute aortic dissection. Hakusensha announced in June 2022 that Berserk would continue under Studio Gaga, supervised by his close friend since high school, the manga artist Kouji Mori, working from Miura's own accounts of the story's planned course. The continuation, and what it means for the books, is covered in this hub's Studio Gaga entry and in the Library's Berserk section.