Artwork of Berserk interview - Page 4 part 2

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Page 2: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Page 3: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Page 4: Part 1


Interviewer: How do you divide the workload between what you draw yourself and what you entrust to your assistants?

Miura: Basically, I precisely create the draft of the poses (1) in relation to the buildings, and I hand them over. For background characters that have already been shown or, in the case of the elf island, for the reappearance of the kid magicians, I draw the draft properly and I entrust it (to the assistants) or I draw (all of it) myself. As for small drawings that don't take much time or for special poses, I just draw them myself. It’s because I don't want to spend time doing drafts, so I do the inking myself directly from the draft of the poses (1), and then there is no timing to hand them over to my assistants. Once I set up a drawing method with "Dur-An-Ki", the work process might change in the future.

Interviewer: In one of your previous interviews, you said "I can come up with a 3D composition in my head and draw it at any angle by turning it round and round". Can I ask you how you trained for this?

Miura: I hate to say this myself but maybe it’s a special ability that I naturally have. *laughs* It was around my high school days that I recognized it. Mori-kun was the first person to voice it: "That’s strange", and I just thought "Is that so?" at the time. There were many people who drew manga well around me, but it’s true that few of them understood three-dimensional objects the way I did. In technology (2) class, I was ridiculously good at things like producing three-sided drawings of three-dimensional objects.

So I'm not aware of having made any specific effort (for it). Everyone has their own specialty area where they have excellent parameters, and in my case I think I was good at apprehending and drawing three-dimensional objects. On the other hand, my parameters for story creation were lacking and I was aware of it, so I made a lot of efforts there.



Note 1: Miura uses the word アタリ (atari), which is a technical term used by mangaka. It refers to the rough drawing of a character's pose before you add details.

Note 2: I'm using the generic word "technology" here for 技術, but in the era Miura is referring to, what they were taught was more akin to industrial engineering than to what people might associate with the word "technology" nowadays.

Note 3: Miura uses the word モブ, which is literally "mob", but it means "background characters" in this context. It's mangaka jargon.

Note 4: Miura uses a number of borrowed English words in Katakana, like タイミング (timing) or パラメータ (parameter). In general we try to keep these as they are as much as possible, but it should be noted that their usage in Japanese is usually not exactly the same than in English. As a result they can seem a little awkward at times.