Serdar | Genji Press

“Tell me—do I need a reason each time I put myself in harm’s way for your sake?”

The sixth volume of Berserk opens with those words, spoken by Griffith—words startling to Guts in the extreme since he’s never had anyone else put himself in harm’s way for him before. Being one of the Band of the Hawk has forced Guts to rethink his place in the world. He’s no longer just one alone, but one of—so maybe he’ll stay and wield his sword for Griffith’s sake, if only for a while. Maybe until something better comes along … without considering, of course, that may be nothing better in this world will come along for him, and that this is as good as it gets.

It’s this kind of insight that makes Berserk so much more than just a war story or a gory adventure, and volume six provides some of the finest character-driven moments in the series on everyone’s part so far. The book doesn’t forget to give us a generous helping of mayhem, either, but always in context: this is, after all, a story about violent men in violent times, and talking about men of war without actually seeing how they wage war kind of misses the point. In this volume we see yet another extension of that theme come into play: what people do when they are faced with the prospect of scrapping one way of life entirely for another. It could be the untested and innocent being forced to take up arms, or it could be noblemen faced with the prospect of having their power pass into the hands of commoners.

It’s amazing how educational some manga can be. By the time I finished the second volume ofGunsmith Cats: Revised Edition, I knew how to take out an antitank gun (aim for the ammo box), outfox a police roadblock at the mouth of an embankment, and perform an end-run around a posthypnotic suggestion reinforced with drugs. Not that I’m expecting to use this knowledge anytime soon, but it’s nice to know it’s all socked away for a rainy day.

And so once again I’ve returned to the over-the-top action-movie world of Kenichi Sonoda’sGunsmith Cats, a classic manga now reissued for a whole new generation of readers in a lavishly remastered set of omnibus reprints. It’s also one of the few but apparently growing manga that seems to be at least as aimed at Western readers as it is its native audience. This sort of thing was mostly unheard of ten years ago, when GC was new, but today it’s not nearly as outlandish—look at Black Lagoon, which I’m betting dollars to doughnuts was crafted with at least some prospects of being an export item. Sonoda’s unquestionably got a burgeoning love of American pop culture, though, and it shows up throughout GC in details both big and little. (Look fast for the license plates that say THX 1138 and USS ENT.)

The name Yasushi Suzuki probably doesn’t ring a bell with you yet, but if The Art of Yasushi Suzukiis any kind of harbinger, he’s bound to become a household name before long. Nominally a concept designer for video games (he’s done designs for Treasure's Arcade / Dreamcast / GameCube title Ikaruga and also their N64 titleSin and Punishment), he’s also contributed illustrations for book covers and card games, and is right now putting the finishing touches on his first foray into manga, Purgatory Kabuki.Purgatory Kabuki’s due out later this year (and believe me, I’ve been waiting very eagerly for it), but if you like what you see here then you have every reason to add this volume to your artbook collection. That said, don’t look for more here than just the pictures, or you’re likely to be a bit let down.

Describing any artist’s work is always a hard job, because so much of what you could say is easily eclipsed by just showing a few pictures and calling it a day. But after "re-reading" Art… a couple of times, I think I finally singled out the elements that make his art special. He applies colors like a painter, but understands line and posture like an illustrator, so in every picture you can see the best of both tendencies. This especially shows up in his designs forPhantoms: The Soul in the Cage (another manga production slated for 2008 from publisher DGN Production Inc.), or the designs for Purgatory Kabuki itself. He’s also equally comfortable drawing the curves of human bodies and the angular contours of machinery—look at the Card Masters designs later in the book—although many of his more outré character designs have the same sharpness to him, but there it works.

Calling Space Pinchy a guilty pleasure would be a grand disservice to all the guilty pleasures I’ve ever known. It’s awesomely, condescendingly dumb—I felt my brain cells leaping to their deaths by the millions as I turned the pages. It makes the knowing wink-wink stupidity of Adult Swim look like a Chicago University Great Books course in comparison.

This is the first manga I’ve seen that gives the despicable Eiken a run for its money in the No Conceivable Audience Department. In other words, if you’re old enough to buy a copy of this thing, you ought to know better—and if you don’t, then you owe it to yourself to learn, because life is short and there are a dozen better things you can blow $15.95 on. (It’s also not explicit enough to be a full-on adult title, so it is essentially one giant brain-dead tease.)

“Man wields the sword so that he might die smiling.”

Those words cover most of one page in the fifth volume of Berserk, right as the heroes of the story—Guts, Griffith, Casca, and the rest of the Hawks—all prepare to do exactly that. Their mercenary band fights not merely to kill, but to perhaps even guarantee themselves a happy death, something they have a far better chance of seeking as a group than any of them do alone. Thus is explained the motives of any clan, any city-state, any nation that ever existed.

It’s heady stuff for a manga, but the consistently amazing thing about Berserk is how it can tackle these massive ideas and somehow come out on top, and not be defeated by them. On the surface, it’s a bruising adventure story of blood and ambition, and just under that it’s something else entirely—an epic about one of the biggest questions we ask ourselves: Are we really “the masters of our fate and the captains of our soul,” or are we just the puppets of unknown gods? (And if we did find out, could we stand up under the weight of the truth?)