Kentaro Miura

To those that are familiar with the world of manga, miura is a legendary figure, a man who dedicated his life to his art.

He is the creator of BERSERK. Many will regard Miura as master of his craft, he was putting out multiple two page spreads in a weekly manga that would have taken his peers more time than that to even sketch, much less ink, storyboard and write around.

When you look up his name you will see dozens of such incredible panels, but only two or three pictures of Miura himself. His art was his life.

But the part about Miura's story that inspires me and makes him the GOAT is not how incredible or how detailed his artwork was at the peak of his career, but how painfully average and mediocre he was when he started out.

Just look at this panel he drew when he was in college, designing the prototype for guts:

To the untrained eye this is not bad, but if you know Shonen Jump and the cutthroat nature of the Industry you'll know that there are hundreds of works better than this that never make it to a single page of print. This is true even of the story, when it started out it was clear that miura was a beginner at this, the characters are one note and fairly cliche.

What makes miura one of the greats was the way he honed his craft, worked at it tirelessly until he was putting out panels like this:

Not only that, his writing improved, characters had depth to them, storylines were gripping and intertwined, character design improved.

Miura was not born with extraordinary talent, but he gave his life in order to become extraordinary and that's why his story inspires me.

Not only did he make the seminal work in the dark fantasy genre his vision is echoed throughout media.

If you've ever seen a character dressed in all black with a giant sword, there is a 99% chance the creator was inspired by berserk.

Just look at dark souls, bleach, final fantasy, Castlevania, this is Miura's legacy. And while we will sadly never see the conclusion to guts story, Miura's vision will live on forever through the artists he inspired.

I would highly encourage everyone interested in the genre to read Berserk, but I will also warn potential readers that there are several events in the story that might be too much for some people. I would also recommend stopping at the last chapter that miura himself was involved with. His team is carrying on the serialization and they're doing as good of a job as they can given the size of the shoes they have to fill, but for me, the story ended with miura.