Berserk is a dark fantasy that Kentaro Miura began in 1989 in Hakusenshaโs Monthly Animal House and continued in the biweekly Young Animal after that magazine launched in 1992. Dark fantasy here means a medieval-flavored setting where the violence and the losses are shown rather than skipped over. The lead is Guts, a swordsman who carries a blade about as long as he is tall, and the other half of the story belongs to the mercenary company he once served in, the Band of the Hawk, and its commander Griffith. The series stands at 43 volumes, the most recent published on August 29, 2025, and Hakusensha announced at that point that worldwide circulation including digital editions had passed 70 million copies.
Miura died on May 6, 2021, of an acute aortic dissection. He was 54. The Young Animal editorial department at Hakusensha made the announcement on May 20 that year. Volume 41, published on December 24, 2021, is the last volume he drew himself. Serialization resumed in Young Animal issue 13, on sale June 24, 2022, under a new credit line: story by Kentaro Miura, art by Studio Gaga, supervision by Kouji Mori. Studio Gaga is the studio formed by Miuraโs assistants, and Mori is a manga artist who had known Miura for decades.
Volume 42, published September 29, 2023, was the first collection under that arrangement. In a comment carried by Comic Natalie on the day it went on sale, Mori wrote that from this point on, this is Berserk without Miura. Volume 43 took roughly two more years to arrive. The schedule is irregular by design now: a run of chapters appears, then the series goes quiet for months.
That pattern is exactly what 2026 looked like. Chapter 398 ran in the September 12, 2025 issue of Young Animal, and nothing followed for nine months. Chapters 399, 400 and 401 then ran in three consecutive issues dated June 12, June 26 and July 10, 2026, each with color pages. Hakusensha marked the June return by opening every chapter collected through volume 42 for free for 48 hours. As of August 21, 2026 no release date for volume 44 has been announced.
The Japanese chapters are on Young Animal Web, which also lets you read a set number of episodes for free once a waiting period passes, and the English edition comes from Dark Horse Comics. Forty-three volumes is a lot to take on, but the Golden Age arc, which covers Guts joining the Band of the Hawk and leaving it, works as a complete story on its own and is the usual place to start. If you want to follow the new chapters as they come out, plan around the fact that they arrive in short bursts rather than on a fixed schedule. (As of August 21, 2026)
