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Kentaro Miura says one real person, a childhood friend of his, inspired both Guts and Griffith

Kentaro Miura apparently had one of the most wild childhood friends, who would go on to embody both Griffith and Guts in Berserk.

Berserk Chapter 375 Image — Image credit: Dark Horse

News by Trent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer

Published on Mon Aug 03 2026

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It is incredible how much a friendship can stick with you over the years. Looking back, Berserk creator Kentaro Miura believed that one of his childhood friends embodied both the protagonist and villain of Berserk. This unnamed friend had the qualities that made Griffith a formidable leader and the raw determination that makes Guts too tough to die and helped push Miura to become one of the greatest manga artists of all time.

In an interview with a professor of gender studies in Japan (which has since been partially translated), Kentaro Miura talked about how his childhood friendship group was the basis for many of the characters in Berserk. Miura himself was the large and soft-spoken Pippin in this group, for example. However, no one was totally translated into a Berserk character. “Manga is a funny thing; rather than taking base models and inserting them into your manga, unchanged,” Miura explained. “You can do things like break the models up and rearrange their different parts into all sorts of strange things.”

“So, for example,” he continued. “In terms of manga, I was head and shoulders above everyone in terms of drawing, but at the same time, I looked up to the guy who used to act as the leader. He was very much like Griffith in terms of ability; he was the type who put his money where his mouth was, and he even had a bit of that touch-of-the-divine to him. In terms of violence, though, I’d say he was very much like Guts. He would go out and get into fights every day, and then come to my house afterwards and say, ‘Alright, let’s draw some manga.’ And then he’d go to his part-time job the next day, sleep-deprived. He was a wonder. So, in order to keep up with him, I felt like I needed some sort of trick of my own, and I decided to work hard on drawing manga. Later on, though, I would find out that he apparently used to act violently the way he did because he was amazed by my ability at manga.”

Berserk God Hand — Image credit: Dark Horse

That friend sounds like the main character in his own manga, to be honest. “So, then in university, he gave up becoming a manga artist, and he decides he’ll do things that the rest of us will be jealous of – sleep with a hundred girls, get hired by a first-rate company, that sort of thing. And he manages to pull it off. Then he becomes an illustrator, and starts pulling in tens of millions of Yen a year while he’s still in his twenties. But it’s still manga that he wants to do, so, in the end, he throws it all away and starts from square one in the manga industry.”

To bring it all back to Berserk, Miura explains how this friend’s life story mirrors that of both Griffith and Guts. “See, up until that point, he’s Griffith. But from there he falls and re-examines what it is he really wants to do, and so, in that sense, that makes him Guts, right? Maybe Griffith and Guts are symptoms that affect boys. When a boy seriously tries to do something, he could become either one.”

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included...