Berserk Volume 1: I’ll Never Forget You, Volume One

I’ll get straight to the point. What makes Berserk so enthralling at it’s most captivating is it’s characters. Like SBR, the world of Berserk is convoluted and filled with self-motivated people. The ideologies that curate these minds crashing and falling out hand in hand is what sends this manga to new heights. Never is Berserk more interesting than when Griffith or Guts speak. No question. And sadly, this volume suffers this loss. Guts as a character is too open-ended here, open to interpretation, open to his era, but open to nothing more. He is a husk of his latter.

Volume one of Berserk is by no means low literature, or low manga: the art is top-class, the world is perfectly hidden and eerily revealed. The dilemma is that this volume collapses at the weight of it’s siblings. Even the worst of later Berserk volumes are far better than this, and that is it’s legacy. Like the opening episodes of FMAB, it’s lost to the ‘skip-it for later’. And I can’t disagree more.

While this volume should be below your usual expectations for this seinen classic, it should still have a place for your time. If you desire a comparison, take SBR and Araki’s evolution artistically speaking. Sure, you could skip till ‘the art is impeccable’ but you miss the detour. The DETOUR, Johnny! As a certain Pizza Mozzarella reminded me, “The shortest route was a detour. It was the detour that was our shortest path.” He was not just saying the detour was our shortest path, but that it’s the most rewarding, the most spiritual, the most real.