Kentaro Miura's Berserk: What Studio Gaga Inherited After His Death

Kentaro Miura died on May 6, 2021, at the age of 54, of an aortic dissection. He had drawn Berserk for 32 years. The manga he left behind was unfinished — chapter 364 had been published in March 2021 and was the most recent installment. Across more than three decades, Miura had built a 41-volume serial that is the canonical reference for dark fantasy in modern manga.

The question that followed his death was whether Berserk would continue. By industry convention, manga series end when their mangaka dies. There are exceptions — some mangaka have credited assistants who continue their work — but the assumption is that a serial without its creator is over. Berserk’s status in May 2021 was, accordingly, unresolved.

In June 2022, Hakusensha (the manga’s publisher in Young Animal magazine) announced that Berserk would resume publication. The new chapters would be drawn by Miura’s Studio Gaga assistants and overseen by Kouji Mori, Miura’s close friend and a manga creator in his own right (Holyland, Suicide Island). The first new chapter — chapter 365 — was published in June 2022.

As of early 2026, Berserk has published roughly 25 additional chapters under the Studio Gaga / Mori arrangement. What those chapters are, and what they tell us about how serialized manga can survive a creator’s death, is the actual story here.

Miura’s working methods and the assistant question

Understanding what Studio Gaga can and can’t continue requires understanding how Miura actually drew Berserk in his final decade. By the mid-2000s, Miura had moved Berserk from black-and-white-heavy work to extraordinarily detailed crosshatched panels with cinematic backgrounds. The art style of the Fantasia arc (chapters 308+) is among the densest panel work in modern manga — pages routinely have 8-12 character figures in detailed armor, with backgrounds depicting whole cities or fantasy landscapes.

This level of detail is not something a single mangaka can produce weekly, or even monthly. Miura’s serialization schedule reflected the reality of the workload. Berserk was published in Young Animal — first weekly (1989-1992), then biweekly (1992-2010), then on a “monthly” schedule that was, by the 2010s, more like a quarterly cadence with frequent breaks. The final years of Miura’s life saw fewer than ten chapters per year.

The work that produced those chapters was largely done at Studio Gaga, a small assistant studio that Miura ran from his home/studio in Chiba. The lead assistants included Kouji Mori (a longtime friend and frequent collaborator) and a rotating group of more junior animators and inkers. Miura did the storyboarding, character work, and key panel art. Assistants did backgrounds, crowd scenes, panel inking, and screentones. This division of labor is standard in modern serialized manga — what was unusual at Studio Gaga was how complete the assistants’ work was, and how much of the final visual signature came from their hands.

This is why Berserk can continue after Miura’s death. The assistant team that drew the backgrounds and supporting work is the same. What’s missing is Miura’s panel design, character work, and overall narrative direction. Kouji Mori is supplying the narrative direction based on conversations he and Miura had over their decades-long friendship; the assistants are drawing in the established visual style.

What the post-Miura chapters actually read like

The 25 chapters of post-Miura Berserk that have been published since June 2022 are, technically, very faithful to the established style. The art looks like Berserk. The pacing matches the slow, dread-heavy progression of the manga’s later arcs. The character work is consistent. If you read a chapter without checking the date, you would not immediately know it was post-Miura.

What’s harder to assess is whether the narrative is what Miura would have written. Mori has stated publicly that he and Miura discussed the manga’s ending in detail over many years, and that he is working from a clear sense of where Berserk needs to go. The chapters published so far have moved the plot meaningfully forward — Casca’s restoration arc, which was the major outstanding character thread at the time of Miura’s death, has progressed substantially. The Falconia arc structure is being filled in. Griffith and Guts are moving toward an inevitable confrontation that the manga has been setting up since chapter 1.

What is harder to write — and what Mori has been more cautious about — is the philosophical and tonal weight that defined Miura’s writing. Berserk’s central question is whether human will and choice mean anything against cosmic predetermination. Miura’s late chapters wrestled with this question in increasingly metaphysical terms; Causality, Idea of Evil, the role of the God Hand. The post-Miura chapters have been more plot-forward and less philosophically dense. Whether this is a deliberate choice by Mori (to focus on resolving the established plot before engaging more abstract material) or a consequence of Miura not being there to write that material is something readers will probably disagree about.

The legacy and the influence

Berserk’s influence on modern manga is difficult to overstate. The dark fantasy genre as currently practiced — Vinland Saga, Vagabond, Goblin Slayer, the Souls video game series, much of modern Western fantasy comic art — owes a direct stylistic debt to Berserk. Specific design choices that originated in Berserk (the oversized weapon, the maimed protagonist with a prosthetic, the demonic warrior aesthetic) are now genre conventions.

Within manga specifically, three mangaka have publicly named Berserk as a primary influence: Makoto Yukimura (Vinland Saga), Sui Ishida (Tokyo Ghoul), and Tatsuki Fujimoto (Chainsaw Man). Fujimoto in particular has said in multiple interviews that he reread Berserk weekly during his teenage years and that the manga’s pacing taught him how to write extended action sequences.

The influence on Hidetaka Miyazaki’s work at FromSoftware is also worth naming. Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Elden Ring — the visual design of these games’ bosses, the use of the “great helm” aesthetic, the eclipse-based cosmology of Bloodborne — all draw directly from Berserk. Miyazaki has spoken publicly about Miura’s influence and has expressed sadness at Miura’s death.

What Berserk represents in this context is not just a single manga. It is the work that established what dark fantasy could be in serialized art. The post-Miura continuation, whatever one’s view of it, is operating in a category that Berserk itself defined.

The anime adaptations and what they got wrong

Berserk has been adapted to anime three times. The 1997 series, which covered the Golden Age arc, is widely considered the canonical adaptation despite being only 25 episodes. The 2012-2013 film trilogy redid the Golden Age arc with mixed reception (the action animation was better; the character animation worse). The 2016-2017 TV series attempted to adapt the post-Golden Age arcs and is widely considered a disaster — the CG animation was poor, the pacing was rushed, and the project is generally treated as a cautionary example of how not to adapt manga.

The reason the post-Golden Age arcs are hard to animate is the same reason they are slow to draw: the manga’s visual density. Berserk’s mid-arc battle scenes require a level of animation detail that TV anime budgets cannot sustain. Multiple attempts to animate the Conviction arc and the Falcon of the Millennium Empire arc have been announced and quietly canceled.

As of early 2026, there is no active Berserk anime adaptation in production. The status of the property is “manga continues at Studio Gaga, anime rights held but unused.” This is, in some ways, the right state. Berserk’s late material is so visually dependent on Miura’s specific panel work that an animated adaptation may simply not be feasible to do well.

Where to read Berserk in 2026

The manga is licensed in English by Dark Horse Comics, which has published the collected volumes (1-42 as of early 2026) and continues to release new volumes as the post-Miura chapters accumulate. The chapters appear in Young Animal magazine in Japan; English translation typically arrives 4-6 months after Japanese publication.

In Arabic-language markets, Berserk does not have an official translation. This is a significant gap — Berserk is one of the most influential manga in publishing history, and its absence from official Arabic catalogs is notable.

The Berserk encyclopedia entry on Otakira, sourced from MyAnimeList and AniList ratings data with publication history from Hakusensha, is on the Berserk manga page.

What Berserk now is

The honest summary, four years after Miura’s death, is that Berserk is now two manga simultaneously. There is the work Miura drew from 1989 to 2021, which is one of the most important serialized comics in any medium. And there is the work Studio Gaga and Kouji Mori have been continuing since 2022, which is faithful, well-crafted, and operating in a register that is not quite Miura’s but is also not pretending to be anyone else.

How readers should engage with the latter is up to them. Some readers, understandably, are treating Miura’s work as the complete Berserk and ignoring the continuation. Others are reading the new chapters as a serious continuation and engaging with them on their own terms. Both responses are reasonable.

What’s not reasonable is treating the continuation as either a betrayal of Miura’s work or a complete extension of it. It is neither. It is its own thing, drawn by people who knew Miura and want to finish the story he started, and it should be read with that context in mind.

The remaining narrative — Griffith and Guts’s final confrontation, the resolution of the Idea of Evil, what becomes of Casca, the role of Skull Knight, the truth of the God Hand — is still to come. Whether Studio Gaga and Mori manage to bring it to completion, and whether the completion satisfies readers, is the open question of 2026 and beyond.