There was once a movie called The Wild Bunch, a Western that did what no other Western before it had done: it made the West look like a horrible and violent place, not a breeding ground for heroes or men of honor. In Roger Ebert’s words, the movie “cleared away the moralistic oatmeal” of the Western and left behind something a lot less romantic, but a whole lot more realistic and thought-provoking. This wasn’t the West we wanted, but it might well have been the West we deserved.

In the same way, Berserk clears away the moralistic oatmeal of the fantasy genre. It takes the epic-adventure that we see in something like The Lord of the Rings and strips out all of the assumptions we bring to it: that the bad guys will lose, that the good guys will win (and that they deserve to), and that violence doesn’t just strike like lightning and kill whoever happens to be standing there. What is left behind is one of the darkest and bleakest stories you’ll ever read, but once you get started you won’t be able to pry yourself loose. If you have a strong stomach you owe it to yourself to discover what may be one of the most horrifically violent, philosophically desolate, and yet also flat-out best manga out there. The first volume is only a taster of what it’s all about—the beginning of a story that has already been unfolding for years and will continue to unfold across over thirty published volumes of manga in Japan (and eighteen or so in English, as of this writing).