Berserk 27

Kentaro Miura – Dark Horse – 2009 – 33+ volumes

The beginning of this volume doesn’t really hold any surprises, but the Berserker Armor is way cooler than I initially thought.  Of course it’s cursed/magic so that it’s pushing Guts past his limits and making it so he doesn’t feel pain… but apparently it’s not really protecting him from severe blows, so his bones are breaking as he fights the apostles.  The armor helps him alone by digging metal spikes into his bones and holding them together and reinforcing them so he can fight.  What. That’s one of the most insane things I’ve ever seen.  And of course the story takes several opportunities to deliver bone-crushing blows, complete with anatomy illustrations of the bones breaking inside of Guts and then being impaled by the spikes.

After this fight, the story takes a big detour to look into Midland in Charlotte’s kingdom.  It’s overrun by the Kushan and their king.  This is, of course, a lot more extreme than it first seemed, since the captiol is near deserted, with dead bodies impaled on the spires of all the buildings and the women being sacrificed in insane demon rituals.  The king himself seems to be a powerful apostle looking to challenge Griffith and the Band of the Hawks directly.  He, uh… is keeping Charlotte unharmed in a tower in the castle.  You… you can imagine where that is going in this series, but thankfully he thinks better of it before the act is committed.

There’s an awesome struggle between his demons and Griffith’s demons in the Band of the Hawk, which is interrupted by a scene where we see how the King’s demons are being made.  It is absolutely horriffic and very graphic, just like everything else, and involves naked pregnanent women beind dipped into a bio-mass of demons and little demon babies popping out of their corpse.  It’s just Berserk’s style to do the most tasteless thing possible, of course.

The art in the demon warring scenes is pretty incredible.  The Kushan-created demons all look alike in theory, but any spread showing them, you’ll see that they are all drawn slightly differently, with different intricate details and even slightly different armour designs for each demon.  There are also really awesome-looking elephant demons and a few other things that I really appreciated the design for, and of course we get to see a lot more apostles, each with a pretty incredible design.

Now, as awesome as all this was, I was pretty angry it took me away from what was happening with Guts and his crew.  We rejoin at the very end of the volume, where we see that Guts was more or less mortally wounded in that fight and may or may not have much longer to live, even with all the healing magic Schierke, the two elves, and the armour (which only takes away pain) have to offer him.  I’m guessing he’ll live long enough to slay what needs slaying, but I’m going to be pretty broken up if Guts dies at the end of the series without getting at least a little peace.  Especially since he seems to be enjoying himself with his new party so much.  It’s hard to deny the charm of Isidro’s hero-worship, Guts’ careful watch over Schierke, the way he appreciates Farnese watching over Casca, little details like that.  It’s a pretty homey scene at the moment.

Anyway.  On to Elfhelm!