Manga Mondays: Berserk + Oldboy + Oh My Goddess!

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Manga Mondays: Berserk + Oldboy + Oh My Goddess!

11/18/2013 9:03am

Manga Mondays: In stores this week—the return of Berserk, Old Boy, and Oh My Goddess!

There’s little doubt that Kentaro Miura’s Berserk is among the most gut-wrenching, blood-drenched, mind-scrambling fantasy/horror sagas ever imagined. I can still remember when Berserk was first brought to Dark Horse, and the very first volume had my jaw hanging agape from page one! The sensory assault was positively relentless, as though the iron hand of Guts, the Black Swordsman, was reaching out of the book, grabbing me by the throat, and smacking my head repeatedly against a wet dungeon wall. I’d never seen anything like it. But over time—once I was able to look away from the abyssal horror pouring from the pages—I began to be pulled in by the complexity and depth of the story being told. Volume after volume passed with endlessly layered character interaction and astonishing narrative turns. Berserk is so much more than murder, monsters, and mayhem—and Berserk is the undisputed heavyweight champ of that stuff, too!

Hardcore Berserk fans are no doubt aware that the series has been on hiatus in Japan a while, and rumors of Miura’s ill health have spun out of control. Happily, Miura is just fine, working on a side project before returning to his signature creation. That said, the Dark Horse edition of the most current volume collected in Japan, volume 37, will hit US comics shops on Wednesday, November 20, winding up the titanic battle of Guts and company against the leviathan Sea God. Your brains are too small to imagine it! (Well, at least mine is.) It’ll be a while before volume 38 shows up stateside, but knowing Kentaro Miura, the wait will be well worth it! Also, every volume of Berserk is currently back in print at Dark Horse, so if you’ve missed some, here’s your chance to fill in the gaps. And if you’ve never read Berserk, snap to it, troop—you got a lotta great reading in front of you!

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I have exactly one Eisner Award, the comics industry’s top prize, in my office, and it’s for the 2007 Best U.S. Edition of Foreign Material—Japan, awarded to Old Boy by Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi. Most comics readers are not familiar with the Old Boy manga, though they may have seen Chan-wook Park’s Cannes Film Festival award–winning film Oldboy (the title of the movie is one word; the title of the manga is two), called “a filmmaker’s tour de force” by the Village Voice and “brutally epic” by the Denver Post. And coming to theaters November 27 is director Spike Lee’s English-language remake, starring Josh Brolin of No Country for Old Men in the title role. I’m pumped—but ya gotta read the comics, man! They don’t give away Eisners in breakfast cereal, y’know!

All eight amazing volumes of the original manga are now back in print at Dark Horse Manga. Written with terse, violent beauty by Garon Tsuchiya and illustrated with consummate skill by Nobuaki Minegishi, Old Boy is an intense, bare-knuckled urban thriller in the tradition of Pulp Fiction and Payback. A man is kidnapped and locked away from the world for a decade, never knowing the identities of his captors or why they imprisoned him. Over time he changes into something different . . . something lethal. And then one day, he is released without explanation to reclaim what’s left of his life . . . and what’s left is revenge. An adult series written by adults for adults, Old Boy is a must-read for anyone longing to find graphic fiction without capes or zombies, where the worst monsters are 100 percent human.

—Chris Warner, Senior Editor

One of our manga this week is not like the others. ^_^ After an seven-month hiatus—for, as with Berserk, we’ve basically caught up with the Japanese editions—Kosuke Fujishima’s Oh My Goddess! returns in English, with volume 45 in stores this Wednesday. I want to take a moment to observe that this November marks a quarter-century (!) for the beloved manga; volume 45 starts with chapter 283, but chapter 1 ran in the November 1988 issue of Kodansha’s Afternoon magazine, which is still its home today.

Fighting people with hammers is not exactly Oh My Goddess!’s style (although I suddenly had an image of Skuld raising her mallet á la Min-sik Choi in Oldboy) and I’m not sure that so much as a drop of blood has ever been spilled in all the years Oh My Goddess! has been running in Japan (though there’s been plenty of bruising). Endurance and willpower, however, are just as much the stuff of Oh My Goddess! as they are of Old Boy or Berserk. The joke used to be that OMG! was about a couple who lived together but still weren’t quite comfortable holding hands (Fujishima’s pal Yoshitoh Asari—yeah, the same guy who designed those Angels in Neon Genesis Evangelion—roasts him on this in his introduction to Oh My Goddess! Colors).

But even from the earliest days of the manga, it’s been established that the simple fact that Keiichi and Belldandy live together at all—one a mortal, the other a goddess—is completely unnatural as far as the powers that rule the multiverse are concerned, and in volume 45, Keiichi learns something about their relationship that Belldandy has known all along, but has never said aloud. Having prevailed at last against the forces of Hell, the lovers are about to face a challenge greater still…from Heaven above!

—Carl Horn, Manga Editor

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Manga Mondays: Berserk + Oldboy + Oh My Goddess!

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