The 2022 Great Berserk Exhibition in Ginza presented 32 years of Kentaro Miura’s work while confronting the future of the manga after the artist’s death.
Held at Matsuya Ginza, the exhibition combined original drawings with life-size recreations and detailed sculptural figures.
Original pages beside monumental objects
A full-scale version of Guts’s Dragon Slayer sword confronted visitors near the entrance. A life-size recreation of the character Zodd and figures produced by Prime 1 Studio extended the manga’s imagined world into physical space.
The centre of the exhibition remained Miura’s hand-drawn pages and colour illustrations. Framed individually, they allowed viewers to examine the marks and decisions behind images usually encountered only through printed reproduction.
Twelve works were displayed publicly for the first time. Six were among the final pieces Miura completed before his death in 2021.
A series continuing through Studio Gaga
The remaining six newly shown works were drawn by Studio Gaga, the team of assistants who had worked with Miura.
Berserk had begun in 1989 and remained unfinished at the time of its creator’s death. Miura’s friend and fellow manga artist Kouji Mori knew the planned direction of the story and agreed to supervise its continuation with Studio Gaga.
This made the exhibition both retrospective and transitional. It honoured Miura’s technical achievement while presenting the first visual evidence that the series would move forward.
The emotional force of the display came from that juxtaposition. Visitors could see some of Miura’s last drawings beside work made by the artists charged with carrying his narrative into the future.