On Berserk and Takayuki Yamaguchi.
I'm making this post to vague about a stranger, and also to talk about Takayuki Yamaguchi, who rules.
Someone once said that, in the wake of Miura's untimely death, Takayuki Yamaguchi should take on the mantle of writing and drawing Berserk.
No offense (OK, some offense) to the guy who wrote this, but I can't think of a mangaka with a more diametrically opposed creative voice to Miura's, even if they both had similar root influences (Go Nagai, Fist of the North Star, Phantom of the Paradise and henshin heroes like Ultraman, Kamen Rider and Kikaider) and aesthetic interests (intense gore and violence, muddy textures, weird and often extreme sexual imagery).
For one, Takayuki Yamaguchi is a man who IIRC has directly stated that he's not great at subtle or nuanced emotion and thus excels at creating narratives built off of repressed characters unable to fully express themselves and asking him to illustrate a manga whose identity is partly defined by its creator's mastery of expression and subtle emotion isn't a great idea, really.
He was good at rendering subtle emotions once, during the early chapters of Shigurui, and he then promptly abandoned that skill in favor of intense stoicism for good reason.
One, he makes it look good, two, his work is defined by its detached, clinical tone. He deliberately views characters at a distance, by either using impersonal, novelistic third-person narration, viewing his protagonists through the lens of others within the narrative, or through something as simple as avoiding language and explicit information, valuing weighted silence over exposition. This dovetails *beautifully* with the narratives he handles.
Gekikou Kamen is about a tokusatsu enthusiast's relationship with Imperial Japan as reflected in the art he consumes, Shigurui is a critique of rigid class structures and loyalty to the state, and Exoskull Zero is his version of Casshern Sins I.E a manga about a former superhero in a doomed, fantastical landscape at the end of time out to save people who might not even exist.
They're manga that require an ambivalent approach to function: any kind of emotional scrutability or visceral intimacy would contradict Yamaguchi's novelistic style and frank examinations of flawed social structures and the people they produce.
Shigurui's macroscopic critique of Edo Japan doesn't work as an emotionally intimate narrative, and Gekikou Kamen's critique of the imperialist subtext behind much of tokusatsu doesn't work if you were immediately sympathetic to or understanding of its wannabe imperialist lead, for some examples.
If you asked Miura to draw a Yamaguchi manga, he'd have failed spectacularly because of his love of intense, emotionally intimate storytelling and illustration. He was simply not capable of (or perhaps more accurately simply uninterested in) the kind of emotional ambivalence that Yamaguchi excels at.
Hell, as I'll discuss later, intimacy vs. ambivalence might be the best summation of the differences between Miura and Yamaguchi's respective styles.
I don't think Yamaguchi would be a great choice for Berserk's action scenes either. Yamaguchi displays his mastery of action illustration by dilating time to show every individuated step of the process of movement, making his action feel intensely deliberate and methodical. Every step, and every step within that greater step, matters.
Kentaro Miura, meanwhile, often did the opposite with Guts, depicting the beginning and end of a sword swing and deliberately excising everything in between to generate a sense of speed and kinetic intensity.
