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Berserk's most iconic villain wasn't meant to be that important when he first showed up

Kentaro Miura started Berserk knowing Guts was furious... he just hadn't decided who he was furious at yet.

Femto Berserk Panel — Image credit: Dark Horse

News by Trent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer

Published on Thu Aug 27 2026

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When Berserk first started, Kentaro Miura had a goal of making sure Guts was a brutally angry person. However, that doesn’t mean that the object of his anger – Griffith – was planned from the start. When he first appeared in Berserk, Griffith wasn’t meant to be the overall focus of the story. That didn’t happen until much later.

Kentaro Miura discussed the origins of the Berserk manga in depth during a 2000 interview. The focus was initially on making Guts seem angry; the object of his anger wasn’t necessarily important at the start. “So how well I could evoke the fascinatingness of an angry person was going to make or break the manga at the start. Now, how do I go about making Guts angry? Depending on the answer, he might come out looking like a scary monster and seem inhuman, or maybe he’ll be scary in a more human way. And so when the God Hand showed up in the manga, Griffith still wasn’t all that important yet.”

This is despite Guts having a decidedly visceral reaction when we first see Griffith and the God Hand. However, it wasn’t necessarily firm in Miura’s mind that Griffith was the focus of Guts’ anger or if it was the God Hand in general. “I think there were a bunch of things overlapping in my mind, and they start coming together around the third volume of Berserk,” he said. “First of all, if Guts is angry, there is going to have to be an object of that anger. So I asked myself what people get angry at, and, well, something you see a lot of is the murderer of one’s parents, but as I already said, I was someone for whom friendship mattered a lot to, so the idea of making the target of Guts’ anger a friend, or at least a man of the same general age, naturally came to mind. So I put that character in, but then I have to give the reason why Guts is angry. So then we have the Band of the Hawk, where I make use of my own past.”

The past that Kentaro Miura refers to is partly his experience feeling the need to be equal to so many of his friends, which is what inspired Guts leaving the Band of the Hawk and Griffith’s eventual downfall.

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...