If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy.
Kentaro Miura didn’t plan much of Berserk from the start… just Guts’ desire for revenge and anger
When Berserk started, Kentaro Miura just wanted to see how angry he could make his main character.
NewsbyTrent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer
Published on Wed Aug 26 2026
Popverse’s top stories
- MTG’s head designer wants to change the way we talk about mana
- What Zainab Akhtar learned from taking a year away from ShortBox Comics Fair, and why she’s excited for 2027’s return
- One Piece Film God Valley will be the first canon film in the series history
Nearly 40 years after its debut, Berserkremains one of the most celebrated seinen manga in history –even if it has plenty of shoujo trappings as well. Despite its success, creator Kentaro Miura admits that he didn’t go into Berserk with a grand plan. In fact, all he really planned out was that Guts would be consumed with rage and driven by a need for revenge.
During an interview from 2000, Kentaro Miura discussed how far ahead he had planned Berserkwhen it first started.
“I’d hardly thought any of it out at first,” he admitted. “I had no idea how far I’d be able to run with just that original idea for the manga, and I really hadn’t come up with an idea for the Band of the Hawk at all. Aside from the monster-slaying black swordsman, I had this idea that it’d be easier to give him something to fight if I added an element of revenge to it, and that was about it.”
In that same interview, he later explained that his focus was on Guts’ anger. Everything else was about giving him a reason to be angry.
“In preparation for starting this series, first I asked myself what it was I had to pay attention to, and what I decided was that I would make sure that the character was angry. So then I asked myself how to make him angry. There are a lot of ways to depict anger – there’s the explosive kind of anger, but then there’s the kind of anger where your face just loses its color and goes expressionless. I decided I would just focus on expressing anger and hope I’d find something to work with.”
Even though he didn’t have the whole story planned out, it is clear that Kentaro Miura knew early on what Berserk was about, and that is just how angry Guts gets on his unending quest for revenge.
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
Follow Popverse for upcoming event coverage and news
Trent Cannon: Trent is a freelance writer who has been covering anime, video games, and pop culture for a decade. (He/Him)
Let Popverse be your tour guide through the wilderness of pop culture
Sign in and let us help you find your new favorite thing.
