- Adapted from Aazealh's translation.
This is an interview Miura gave to Glénat, the company that publishes Berserk in France. It was done to mark the French release of volume 40 as well as that of the Flame Dragon Knight light novel.
The interview was being published on Facebook in several parts. You can find them here : Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
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Interviewer: Dark fantasy is relatively rare in manga, but it's very popular in Europe. Why did you choose to explore that genre? And how do you explain Berserk's success?
Miura: I don't use a magic wand, so it'll be hard to find a tangible reason for Berserk's success.
Regarding dark fantasy, my first influence comes from Conan the Barbarian. I didn't see dark fantasy as its own genre, but more as the equivalent of fantasy in general. Outside of Japan, major fantasy works like The Lord of the Rings contain dark elements. In Japan however, fantasy was popularized by video games like Dragon Quest, that are aimed at children and therefore are emptied of any dark element. But I had already been influenced by those novels before I was influenced by those games, so I naturally turned towards dark fantasy.
To get back to the reasons behind Berserk's success, I think it was offering something new to Japanese people. When they became teenagers, the readers who had been playing in fantasy worlds designed for children started to look for other stories of that kind, but that were appropriate for their age. And I think that by reading my series, they discovered new elements, marked by bitterness for example, that held their attention aside from finding it refreshing to get into a work meant for readers older than them. As for its success in foreign countries, maybe it can be explained by the fact people are already closely familiar with this type of story?
Interviewer: We've reached volume 40 of Berserk. It's starting to become a lengthy series. How do you deal with such a long lifespan and what were the main changes between the beginning of the series and nowadays?
Miura: How do I deal with the series' lifespan? Let's say that I'm praying to be able to finish it in my lifetime!
Interviewer: : I think the fans are as well!
Miura: Take good care of yourselves! I'm also taking good care of myself. That's where the main change is. When I started the series, I was less preoccupied with its ending than with telling a story that, in any case, would end sooner or later. But today, having realized that life does not last forever, it's by taking care of my health that I try to finish the series. As far as the process and pace of my work go, the main change is that I've become slower. You know, I feel like being in a spaceship that's hurtling towards a black hole. As it gets closer to it, the flow of time is altered. When I'm working on the manga, I don't feel like time flows differently, and yet it's gone in a flash. As if I was not moving forward at all.
Interviewer: Has your amount of work per page changed?
Miura: Over time I've put more and more attention into details, almost too much. In recent times however, I'm trying to make my artwork more legible.
Interviewer: You've also switched to digital tools along the way.
Miura: I've struggled to find a way to compensate for my slowing pace, but I couldn't find a satisfactory solution. For a while, I was only drawing with a pencil before photocopying the pages and these days, I've moved on to digital tools. On one hand, these tools have made my work faster but on the other, I can't help but to focus on every little detail, which means I spend more time trying to find the proper balance in my art. Regarding the story however, I don't see any major change. It still follows the broad outline I had conceived in the beginning.
Interviewer: You mean that you knew from the beginning your series would be this long?
Miura: No, I didn't know that until I got to the episodes with the Band of the Falcon. I was focusing on Guts, the Black Swordsman, without thinking about a story of this magnitude. But when I got to the Band of the Falcon, I suddenly had a thousand other things to tell.
Interviewer: Berserk mainly revolves around the relationship between Guts and Griffith, which is both complex and very symbolical: shadow fighting light. Why did you reverse the roles and made the black knight into the hero and the white knight into the villain?
Miura: Ever since my childhood, I've found dark heroes to be cool. I don't know if this admiration is a phenomenon specific to Japan. Maybe it's related to the fact Japan is outside of the area influenced by Christian culture. Traditionally, the Christian religion has depicted good and evil by clearly distiguishing the two of them. Every major work created within that zone of influence sticks to that conception. But in Japan, the line between good and evil is more ambiguous and if darkness is cool, then it can be put forward. It's the case with Devilman for example, which I love. These types of works have existed for a long time in Japan, they aren't new. In short, I don't think my series is simply an antithesis of the norm.
Interviewer: Your series makes use of very varied and unusual iconographies in manga, from Eastern mythology to the European Middle Ages, as well as Lovecraft or even Phantom of the Paradise. How do these images come to prevail for you?
Note from Interviewer: While the French question was about iconography, the Japanese interviewer instead asked about "kōzu" (composition) and "design", which is why Miura's answer is unrelated.
Miura: For page composition, it all comes from Akira. When I was a student, and until the beginning of my career, I continuously trained by looking at Akira. I really wanted to gain this nice composition technique, with its various framing styles and multiple points of view. Yes, I really learned a lot thanks to Akira. Regarding my art style, let's take monsters: when I draw Berserk, I already have a realistic representation in mind. In short, I want to give the reader the impression that this other world they're looking at is a real world.
Current Japanese fantasy, whether it's the artwork or the style, is highly creative. It doesn't try to be realistic. But all these anime series didn't exist back in my day. The only visual depictions of fantasy I had access to were, in the theater, movies like Conan the Great or Excalibur. When you see them, you end up naturally thinking that a fantasy author has to have a clear mental representation of that type of world. Like with Willow, for example. And that leads you to draw in a realistic style. You must then think about how to set your monsters in a natural manner. And so you think about how those monsters you see in illustrations from Medieval Europe could actually look, for example. The same goes for the characters. If your world looks like Medieval Europe, you'll think about the elements, materials, styles of that time. It's the combination of all these things that resulted in my current art style.
Interviewer: Yes, you were saying you wanted to create an almost mundane world...
Miura: I feel like current movies and anime series are getting more and more specialized, with people who draw and others who write the story. This specialization results in a separation of these different fields. During my childhood, many heroes had a simple and easy-to-remember appearance. But nowadays children can't draw the toys they're playing with anymore. That's because in the meantime, a new job was born. A job that's about creating the most impressive designs possible. But there's a difference between a complex design and a design that fits the general needs of the work of art.
Interviewer: We can see that with the current Kamen Rider, children can't reproduce such characters.
Miura: That's because the design meant to sell action figures and the design that's coherent with the Kamen Rider world are, in the end, two different things. Maybe it comes from the difference between group work and solo work, but in my case, I've chosen to follow the old way.
Interviewer: Who are your masters, the people who inspired your art style? And among the current generation of mangaka, do you recognize anyone as an heir of yours?
Miura: Like I previously said about Akira, I was strongly influenced by Katsuhiro Ōtomo in terms of graphics. Beyond graphics, the drawing's atmosphere and impact come from Gō Nagai, and my gimmicks are from Dororo [by Osamu Tezuka] and Cobra [by Buichi Terasawa]. As you can see, I've had many influences. I've also unconsciously soaked in the works of many other mangaka. People who aren't familiar with Japan might not know some of the names I'm going to cite, but I started by imitating the manga of publisher Gakken, then those of Shinji Mizushima, Rei Hijiri and Leiji Matsumoto at around the same time, and then Buichi Terasawa.
After that, when I was going from middle school to high school, I wanted to be able to draw realistic art, so I started to imitate, even if they are not mangaka, Noriyoshi Ōrai or even Naoyuki Kato, Guin Saga's illustrator. In short, I improved my technique step by step, by relentlessly imitating all kinds of illustrations and various other things. After that phase where I imitated illustrators, I felt that I needed to start working directly on the human body, so I moved on to pictures of human anatomy from [Thomas] R. Gest's books, for example. I studied by copying those drawings. For a time, I also copied a lot of shoujo manga, especially those of Moto Hagio.
Interviewer: Yes, one can feel that you were influenced by the shoujo manga genre.
Miura: And by anime as well. In fact, since I waited to get into university to build my style on this foundation of conscious and unconscious influences, I can't really cite everybody with certainty. What's certain is that my influences are numerous.
Interviewer: These authors are masters for you?
Miura: They all have been, over time, as I imitated them.
Interviewer: Do you have any heirs among the new generation of mangaka?
Miura: Being a mangaka is a very personal occupation. We all become masters by following our own path, which is why I think that none of us has a real heir. When we enter the world of manga, even if our style resembles that of another author, it will always end up following a different path. That is why I believe that the very notion of an heir does not exist in the world of Japanese manga.