In a dazzling piece of fan art celebrating the surprising return of the manga Berserk, digital artist Ark Nemesis reimagines Gut’s iconic Berserker armor in the captivating style of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.
The cult-favorite manga Berserk tells the story of the orphan Guts and his rise in the “live or die” world of mercenaries to become one of the greatest warriors in the world. On the way, he meets and befriends mercenary leader Griffith, and his lieutenant Casca. The trio is able to achieve astounding success until Guts decides to pursue his own dreams. On his return, he finds much has changed, and Guts is forced to deal with the fallout. After it was first published in 1989, Berserk quickly developed a cult following, even with creator Kentaro Miura’s irregular publication. Then suddenly while on hiatus, news of Miura’s death in 2021 shocked fans in a number of ways, and left readers wondering if the story would ever end as originally planned. Even more surprising was the announcement earlier this month from its publishers that six new chapters of the Berserk manga would be published beginning in late June.
In a June 9, 2022 post to their Twitter account, artist Ark Nemesis tweeted a jaw-dropping rendition of Guts in the Berserker armor in “JoJo style.” JoJo style, which Ark Nemesis explains is their preferred artistic manner, refers to the style of drawing made famous in the manga JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Like Berserk, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is a widely popular, long-running, manga that has also achieved its own massively intense cult following. The style, which was created by JoJo‘s creator Hirohiko Araki, has evolved over the three decades that the manga has been in publication, but is also clearly identifiable.
Among the variety of unique elements of the JoJo style that Ark Nemesis perfectly reproduces, perhaps the most noteworthy in the Guts image is Araki’s facial structure. This style is recognizable by its large eyes, stronger jawlines, pouted, round lips, and sideways glances. These are all perfectly represented in Ark Nemesis’s image with the normally “hardened” Guts visage given a subtle, downright attractive appearance.
Another telltale aspect of Araki’s art is its fashion focus. Gut’s Berserker armor is a massively scary battledress that draws on the wearer’s inner demons to produce a nearly unstoppable force of destruction. Art Nemesis, however, uses the JoJo style to soften the harder Berserk aspects by first changing its color from charcoal black to a more acceptable yellow. The image also matches the armor with a fluffy, silk-like scarf of different shades of green. It’s the type of accessory one would think to find on a fashion model rather than a slayer. However, in perfect JoJo style, it manages to achieve its goal of blending Berserk‘s hardness with the softer notes of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.
