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Nearly 40 years after its debut, Berserk remains one of the most celebrated seinen manga in history – even if it has plenty of shoujo trappings as well. Despite its success, creator Kentaro Miura admits that he didn’t go into Berserk with a grand plan. In fact, all he really planned out was that Guts would be consumed with rage and driven by a need for revenge.

During an interview from 2000, Kentaro Miura discussed how far ahead he had planned Berserk when it first started.

“I’d hardly thought any of it out at first,” he admitted. “I had no idea how far I’d be able to run with just that original idea for the manga, and I really hadn’t come up with an idea for the Band of the Hawk at all. Aside from the monster-slaying black swordsman, I had this idea that it’d be easier to give him something to fight if I added an element of revenge to it, and that was about it.”

In that same interview, he later explained that his focus was on Guts’ anger. Everything else was about giving him a reason to be angry.

“In preparation for starting this series, first I asked myself what it was I had to pay attention to, and what I decided was that I would make sure that the character was angry. So then I asked myself how to make him angry. There are a lot of ways to depict anger – there’s the explosive kind of anger, but then there’s the kind of anger where your face just loses its color and goes expressionless. I decided I would just focus on expressing anger and hope I’d find something to work with.”

Even though he didn’t have the whole story planned out, it is clear that Kentaro Miura knew early on what Berserk was about, and that is just how angry Guts gets on his unending quest for revenge.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

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