In an awesome example of how even the most successful manga artists are, in truth, also massive manga fans, Tokyo Ghoul creator Sui Ishida dropped a personal piece of fanart depicting Berserk's Guts with his iconic Dragon Slayer broadsword.
Originally, Dragon Slayer was not Guts' go-to weapon of choice. In fact, after being forged by the blacksmith Godot, its size made it, he thought, impractical for anyone to use. As a result, he just hung it up in his armory as a sort of set piece. However, in Berserk volume 14, chapter 94, after being cornered by an apostle in Godot's armory with no weapons to use, Guts grabs Dragon Slayer in a last-ditch effort to survive. He finds it very effective in cutting through the tougher skin of higher-level monsters. Eventually, Dragon Slayer becomes Guts' main battle weapon — a weapon that actually gets better with each monster or demon it kills and pairs extremely well with Guts in his Berserker armor.
In a June 7, 2022 post to his Twitter , Tokyo Ghoul and Choujin X creator the official announcement that Berserk will be returning after the untimely death of its creator Kentaro Miura in May 2021. Like many Berserk fans, Ishida has used his social media platform to express his excitement at the return and sketch a gorgeous image of the saga's hero.
While Berserk had its own unique and hugely popular style that captured the spirit of Miura, rather than mimic it, Ishida has sketched Guts and Dragon Slayer in his own iconic artistic style. For instance, while Miura kept to a more traditional, fully formed, cleaner comic style, Ishida uses his more sketch-like approach to obtain a different level of interaction between the artist and the view. This is most clearly illustrated in Sui's representation of the Berserker armor. Whereas Miura went into exquisite detail in illustrating the armor, especially in his depiction of the armor as being all black, Ishida, on the other hand, shows an impressive suit of armor that could be mistaken for any armor normally used in battle. That is, there are no signs that suggest that for an opponent of Guts, this is the last thing they'll ever see.
More interestingly is Ishida's depiction of Dragon Slayer. Miura depicted it, at times, as an outlandishly oversized sword that often seemed bigger than Guts' body, let alone the monsters he faces in Beserk. Sui Ishida's Dragon Slayer, on the other hand, is large but its girth does not suggest that it would be physically impossible for Guts to wield it. It's an awesome artistic hat tip to a manga cult hero from a current insider that is simply pure joy for fans of both Berserk and Tokyo Ghoul.
Source: Sui Ishida
