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No one can accuse Kentaro Miura of being lazy with his backgrounds or character designs. More likely, you’ll accuse him of pouring too much into every page of Berserk. Even Miura himself would admit that his focus on details was borderline unhealthy, but it was all because he was influenced by manga like Akira and Fist of the North Star.

“The level of detail I put into my drawings is an illness,” Kentaro Miura said during a 2019 interview. “There’s no other way to describe it.”

Which is fair, to be honest. This is a man who insisted on giving every fairy an individual expression and every participant in a massive battle a fully detailed suit of armor. It was like he couldn’t help but dive into the minutiae of a scene in the hopes he could give it a bit more life. That drive apparently comes from his love of 1980s manga. “It’s because of the manga I’ve come to love,” he explained in that same interview. “After all, the Baroque era of manga, with its incredibly detailed artwork like Akira and Fist of the North Star, coincided with my formative years. Plus, I believe that manga panels are windows to another world. Because they’re windows that peer into another world, there must be something beyond that. I want readers to feel as much as possible, even the layers of air.”

“Everything has details,” he stressed. “Even clothes have fabric and thread, and the surface is different depending on the material. I want to be able to feel those kinds of details, like the things between the lines in a manga.”

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... 

• Aggretsuko vs Chainsaw Man: Two Wildly different anine with the same anti-capitalist message
• The Summer Anime season return of Kaiju No. 8, Sakamoto Days, & Dan Da Dan are forcing me to break my vow of watching less anime
• From Tomo-Chan to Oshi No Ko: How some of your favorite manga creators got their start in hentai
• Piracy is baked into anime's past, but, like Crunchyroll, we should move on from it
• Flying whales, mechs, and Miyazaki vibes: Inside Netflix's Leviathan anime with the people who made it
• How AI translations of manga continues the 'enshitification' of the medium, and why Japanese publishers are "less precious" about it
• I never wanted a Cyberpunk Edgerunners sequel, but God help me I'm going to watch it
• The Summer Hikaru Died delivers its cosmic horror at an agonizingly slow pace
• The one thing that Dan Da Dan does better than Demon Slayer ever did
• Studio Ghibli movies have never been as cozy as you think they are and that's what makes them magic