The second volume of Berserk does three things at once, all of them well. It pushes us farther into the plot that was tentatively established in the first volume; it establishes a key component of theBerserk mythology, and it continues to serve up the astonishing levels of violence and bloodshed that have become a major hallmark of the series. It’s easy to miss the forest for the trees with this series, though. Under all the spattering gore and over-the-top machismo (ironically enough, the very things that draw some people to Berserk in the first place) is an enormously smart, if deeply bleak, story. Once you start reading it and get over the initial shock of how dark it is, you’ll want to stay on for the whole ride and find out where it takes you. To paraphrase an old beer ad, it refreshes the parts other manga do not reach.

At the end of the first volume, Guts—the diabolically powerful Black Swordsman with one eye and a mechanical hand, an immovable object to everyone else’s irresistible force—had run afoul of the Count, a tyrannical ruler grinding his kingdom into fearful submission under his heel. Everyone who tries to contradict the Count is branded a “heretic” and summarily executed. It doesn’t take long for Guts—marked with the Brand that indicates he’s fodder for the demons of the world beyond—to become the Count’s next big target. Guts refuses to go quietly, of course, and a good portion of Volume 2 is taken up with Guts encountering one successively more bulked-out minion of the Count after another and somehow coming out on top, no matter what it costs him (or the people around him). The end of the volume’s an over-the-top cliffhanger, with the Count mutating into an obscenely huge wormlike beast, the better to devour Guts whole—as he has devoured so many others, a grotesquerie which we glimpse in one particularly ghastly flashback.