4 out of 5

Miura’s tale of anger-generator Guts continues, smacking the guy around for about two hundred pages, having him get up and grunt and wisecrack between smacks, then chop-chop some body parts with his big ol’ sword.

And yet, our tale continues to evolve to be more than the sum of those seemingly obvious parts, slipping fascinatingly gray concepts into the black and white good versus evil, and especially with the commencement of the first part of The Golden Age arc, which details Guts’ adoption into a band of mercenaries as a young boy.

Miura’s slight subversion of what we might expect of young Guts – either a tough as nails kid or an overly wimpy one – into a pretty normal child (excusing his parenting circumstances) who’s just encouraged down one path or another, is a good indication of the potential of the characters yet to come, or to be explored.

This goes along with the insanity of The Godhand – Berserk’s ruling demon class – although I’ll forever have to wonder how that scene might’ve affected me differently if I didn’t have another appearance from the anime in mind as a spoiler.

Miura’s art feels cleaned up a bit between this volume and the last, the grand scale action clearer, with less force lines going on and more intuited from character orientation. The expanded in The Golden Age also gives him a chance to work on his many variations of the “don’t show or tell” emotional states of the warrior.

The action indulgences and humdrum comedy relief from Puck are the only real distractions at this point.  More golden age ahead…