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One thing that Kentaro Miura never worried about while working on Berserk was a sense of historical accuracy. That was very much intentional, as he felt his imagination worked best when it wasn’t tied to something set in the real world. However, writing a historical manga was something he always aspired to do; he just didn’t get the chance.

During an interview included in the Berserk Illustrations File, which has been translated by Puella of the SkullKnight forum, Kentaro Miura was asked why he didn’t want to write a straight historical manga instead of including the many fantasy elements that fill the pages of Berserk.

“Precisely speaking, it’s because I thought the range of my imagination might become narrow if I depended on history while I was still young. For example, Mitsuteru Yokoyama has currently been drawing a historical manga, but he drew Tetsujin 28 and Babel II in his early career. And Shotaro Ishinomori has drawn many informative manga recently. But without Cyborg 009, one of his early works, he wouldn’t be what he is now… So I preferred to bet on my imagination while I’m young rather than to do a historical or informative manga.”

Miura tragically died in 2021, before he got to finish Berserk, but he had the ambition to work on a manga after he finally finished his iconic fantasy manga.

“I want to work on these kinds of manga in my late career,” he concluded. Tragically, he never got the chance to apply what he learned making Berserk to a manga based more closely on history.

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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