Books: Berserk Vol. #2

While Guts hacks (and slices, and slashes, and disembowels) his way through the Count’s ranks of monstrous minions, Puck is taken prisoner and given to the Count’s daughter as a plaything. The girl is as innocent and wistful as her father is diabolical, and with Puck’s help she conspires to slip out from between Dad’s fingers — that is, if demonically-mutated Dad doesn’t end up devouring Guts and everyone else in his way first. Guts also uncovers the reason for the Count’s slide into paranoia: he’s come into possession of a magical artifact called a Behelit, an egg-shaped stone that sports a weird jumble of human features on its surface. Guts knows what it is, and why it warps the souls of everyone who come across it: it can be used to open a gateway to a dimension inhabited by demons, like the puzzle box in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser.

How Guts knows all this about the Behelit is of course left up in the air for now, but will soon become one of Berserk’s largest and most important plotlines: the story of the Godhand. Miura drops a number of hints that things are never quite what they seem — such as suggestions of a deep empathic connection between Guts and his fairy sidekick, Puck, which at first seems only like a convenience of the plot but is about a lot more than just that in due time. The way Guts deals with the crippled wizard who knows about the Behelit is doubly revealing: when the old man is sent to the chopping block and begs Guts to avenge him, the swordsman sneers — but then changes his mind. Yes, he will take revenge, but for his own reasons; he won’t admit to what might really be driving him, of course. The measured way Miura reveals all this is one of the many signs there’s a much better storyteller at work than the double-page images of bloodletting might initially let on.

Art: One constant point of praise for Berserk is Kentaro Miura’s artwork. And even though the first few volumes are a little rougher and less polished than the later ones (his anatomy and perspective are sometimes a bit awkward), you can immediately see what the screaming is about. Miura’s loving attention to detail on most any page or panel is stupefying — and sometimes downright repulsive, as when he shows Guts spattering his namesake across the page. But he also pays great attention to other kinds of details that matter — the look on a face, the knotted muscles in one’s shoulders or neck — and his character designs are markedly more “Western” (and that much more striking) than what you’d see in most other fantasy manga. It’s the sort of design work that’s impossible to mistake for anyone else’s achievements.

Translation: Dark Horse has almost never done a bad job with any of their titles.Berserk has been presented unflopped and uncensored (each volume is also in shrinkwrap, this being an 18+ title), although only spoken texts have been relettered. Sound effects are not translated or retouched, and there’s no glossary of same in the back. I could say that’s a minus, since Berserk is one of those titles that a fan from another kind of comic oeuvre (i.e., Heavy Metal) might be able to get into, and the lack of FX translations might be a stumbling block for them. But I suspect the force of the story and artwork would win them over in time.

The Bottom Line: If you read the first volume and were hooked, Volume 2 is mandatory reading; the action’s been ratcheted up a notch, and the webs of intrigue (and tentacles, and pesudopods) that ensnare Guts are all the thicker.