NINE YEARS AGO
I started reading Berserk. I read it very slowly, because there wasn’t a library near me carrying it, I didn’t want to read it on a computer screen or a phone, and I didn’t have an e-reader at the time, so I collected the volumes, one every six months or so (which, I suppose, wasn’t too far off from (certain stretches of) the original publication schedule). When I got to volume 6 I happened to be in France, which at the time allowed me to discover that tankōbon are half as expensive in France as they are in the United States; i.e. I bought two volumes of Berserk while abroad, and read them both. They didn’t inspire me to continue: those first several volumes weren’t especially compelling—especially compared against the exaggerated praise I’d heard about the series—and the language barrier posed by the French volumes meant I missed all but the most surface-level elements of the story. This was in 2017.
TWO MONTHS AGO
I started over. What I’d read years ago gave me an impression but didn’t let me in on any of the… mysterious words I’d heard in discussion of the series: eclipse? Skull Knight? What’s all this about a boat? I read the same five Dark Horse and two Glénat volumes I still have, and am reading the rest in French “scantrads” on a Kobo. Today I finished volume 10. Given my earlier experience, I’m a bit surprised to find it hard to put down. Especially because…
The beginning of the story transpired in much the same way as I remembered, which is to say roughly—Miura was basically a kid when he started writing and it comes across that way. The drawings are good, great for a 23-year-old, bearing an incredible amount of detail—much of which must have been wholly invented—in the architectural features and tailoring of bygone European times (anachronisms abound, but even so), but characters lack a kind of human authenticity of proportion—limbs are stiff, non pliable; facial expressions too are limited. But just as the art gets better as it goes along, so does the writing; more worthwhile characters and themes emerge from the stew of provocative, seemingly aimless violence and misogyny it begins with. And what makes the developing story compelling is not that it ignores this material as laid out in early chapters, but that it follows from it. First impressions of Guts are not favorable: a wandering misanthrope who knows only combat and isolation. He doesn’t want anyone to touch him (feels a little on the nose). Guts’s tagalong fairy companion Puck, who does a significant amount of the talking in early chapters, annoys not only Guts but the reader too. Action scenes seem perfunctory, as you sense the protagonist is never in real danger. The series’ portrayal of women, especially in these early chapters, could be the basis of a whole study on women in fantasy media, Japanese comics, and so on.
As the story continues, the reader is propelled through various flashbacks, dream sequences, and inner monologues which all lend a greater sense of texture and depth to the narrative’s main players. I was able to understand, slowly, the man that Guts would grow into as I saw him at the beginning of the story. Griffith, only glimpsed in a strange sequence at the end of volume 3, becomes a character unto himself. We meet Casca, who has her own aspirations, desires, flaws. Guts forms real relationships with these two. Though still not a personal favorite, action sequences feel more urgent thanks to their involving characters other than Guts. Puck is of course absent, and his manga slapstick along with him.
I’m enjoying everything more this time around for a few reasons: (1) I’m older and have more tolerance for/distance from the stuff I didn’t like the first time, (2) I’m able to read French now, (3) I’ve stuck with it long enough to allow all this compelling extra stuff to develop. I recently read the chapter where ||Guts and Casca make love. Even as its illustration seemed a little pornographic (certainly in light of that feeling),|| it was a surprisingly moving scene, and the one when I realized I now care about these characters, their goals, their failures, their dreams, more than I ever had before. I watched the same scene as adapted in the '97 TV series, and I almost wish I hadn’t, because it’s done really beautifully. The narration and Hirasawa music over panning still frames of detailed character art is a compelling form, who’d have guessed.
I have up through volume 17 downloaded to my Kobo and will probably get close to finishing that in the next month. Berserk isn’t my favorite comic or anything, but I’m glad to have this moment with it. It seems like it will only improve as it continues.
