The manga world was rocked last May when it was announced that Kentaro Miura, best-selling writer and author of Berserk, had passed away due to acute aortic dissection, leaving his incredibly dark magnum opus unfinished. But at least the series’ many American fans will finally get their chance to see Miura’s final work on the series when Dark Horse releases the 41st volume later this year.
Trying to summarize even the tiniest portion of the epic, which Miura began waaaay back in 1989, is a fool’s errand. Suffice it to say it stars a swordsman named Guts who joins mercenary group the Band of the Hawk, falls in love with a fellow mercenary named Casca, and then begins to spill an immense of amount of blood over Miura’s incredible artwork. Here’s Dark Horse’s official summary for the volume:
“Though released from the prison of her mind, Casca cannot escape reminders of the terrors she has experienced. And nothing triggers these harrowing memories more than Guts the Black Swordsman, who faced those same horrors in his relentless quest to see Casca healed. But could the reappearance of a strange, mute boy be the key to bringing peace to Casca’s troubled soul?”
The 40th and most recent volume of Berserk was published in the U.S. on September 25, 2019, and a full year prior to that in Japan. Miura was infamous for taking long hiatuses (only eight volumes have been released since 2010). Still, Berserk has always been one of the best-selling manga in the world, having sold more than 50 million copies.
Volume 41 will arrive in America on November 9 in comic book stores and November 22 in regular bookstores, and come with a two-sided color poster. As for what’s next, the editors of Young Animal, the bimonthly anthology which has published the manga since 1992, said last year they were still weighing their options as to what to do with the series after Miura’s passing. So for the foreseeable future, Berserk ends here.
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