Berserk Illustrations file

It's difficult to tell from the tiny cover, linked from Amazon.com, but Kentarou Miura is a fantastic artist. I was hooked into Berserk through the anime. It ends in a... bad spot so to speak, and I wanted to know what the hell happened after the event.

The manga is where I decieded I'd find out. Thankfully, by this time, Dark Horse has picked up the license and was zipping them out fairly quickly.

For several years, I lived in Mount Prospect and we had a Mitsuwa market there. One of the asian stores was a bookstore that had manga and other bits in the original language, region free DVD players, and a ton of anime soundtracks.

Among those treasures was the Berserk Illustratons file. It's a large table sized book, larger than the Warriors and Warlords of Angus Mcbride, but in softcover. I can't remember how much I paid for it, but I was fascinated by it. Kentarou's art, much like George Perez of comic book fame, is meant for large screen viewing. He has a great sense of motion, of detail, and of control.

While many of the illustrations within are the same as the covers of the individual books, having them in the expanded size is nice. Some of them are also new to me and I'd never seen them before.

When I'm in the mood for something of the fantastic and the macarbe, if it's seeing the monstrous Zod in all his transformed glory looking like a fallen angel of beastial might, or sseing the evolution of Guts from a child soldier to a soldier to a slayer of evil, the Berserk Illustrations file is never far from my bookshelf.