Hi,

I just started reading the Berserk manga.. holy shit.... i never encountered something as dark, cool, sadistic, twisted and no-mercy as in the initial few chapters of Berserk (just before the Golden Age Arc).

Any recommendations of seinen that delivers that type of impact to you? Something that is so dark and serious you will find it hard to believe, but yet at the same time so cool.

Thanks. 😎

It is realy hard to match Berserk´s nihilistic worldview and the first 3 aren´t the darkes part of the manga.
Ookami no Kuchi: Wolfsmund from his former asistant comes closest in the fatasy/manga field. Jisatsutou from Miura´s good friend becomes blow out your brains worthy too. Another highschool friend of his is writing Kento Ankokuden Cestvs about slavery that needs to be picked up again.
I have other examples in the field of manga(ero-guro 😔 does not coult to me and leads to epic vomit) but i will give you some outside the box instead.
Try out comicbooks by Avatar Press like Crossed Family Values. They hire some of the best writer in the field of comics and give them NO content restrictions. The Walking Dead comic is also pretty close.
Taste the ranbow.

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Tough order tbh. Maybe Blade of the Immortal but I think it has the reverse problem of starting off (relatively) tame and getting progressively darker and twisted as it went on. Also the violence becomes incredibly sexually graphic once Shira is introduced and escalates from there which is... uncomfortable.

Obvious examples like Blade of the Immortal, Shamo(turns in nonsense by Vol.12),the World Is Mine(highly inconsistent), Gantz(runs on deus-ex machina) and other long form works are good examples but a bit inconsistent. Some characters have it WAY worse then others and there is off screen stuff going on. Every Bersek arc has a different feel and addresses other fantasy conventions to be fair but i never saw restraint on Miuras part. Guts is no villain protagonist but his live has almost no bright spots and Miura dares to do more unsympathetic things with him the Ice and Fire and other "dark" series.
You wouldn´t see a scene in GoT where John Snow has a waking dream about raping and eating Ygritte alive and then precedes to attacks her or a long lingering moment where a dissolving child corpse rains gore upon him. Miura has ballZ of steal and the writing skills to back his content. Troll-cave for live ! The only thing in Bersek that i find indefensible are the first 5 pages. Gut´s action are crazy out of character to match the man he turns into as the story goes on and back.
I will defend most of the things in Blade of the Immortal but Hiroaki other "mature" marked manga´s are just fetishised garbage. Especial his porn album is hell on earth.
I lost all respect for him as an artist when i read some of his other work 😢 .

I also read EU/US comics and am a librarian.
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Quote from residentgrigo

Guts is no villain protagonist but his live has almost no bright spots and Miura dares to do more unsympathetic things with him the Ice and Fire and other "dark" series.
You wouldn´t see a scene in GoT where John Snow has a waking dream about raping and eating Ygritte alive and then precedes to attacks her

It's not a clear comparison. Remember: one of these series has a main character dream about strangling his defenceless ex-lover - the other has a main character actually do it.

The scene i mean is in chapter 190 and is after cooking and eating of the small child the during the satanic orgy the darkest scene in the series by far. No instants of breast hanging can reach if you as me. Gut´s actually draws blood when he wakes up and discovers that he bit her breast for real. He was possessed but possession only draws out hidden desires and does not create them.
I had a discussion about this very topic the other day where i and my friend came to the conclusion that Guts is the darkest protagonist in an acclaimed and long form series by far. A 1 to 1 adaptation of Berserk is downring unfilmable. George Railroads Martin is pulling his punches in my opinion(still a big fan) and i pulled Snow out of a hat.
Stannis Baratheon(my personal favorite) would make a better comparison but he could turn into an anti-christ character and is not a focal-point in the books because of it´s structure. Tyrion is a tragic protagonist but always sympathetic and heroes. His byronic qualities are VERY played up. He even has a justification for prostitution in the story. His strangling scene is very justified by context, a croud pleaser and the shear abhorredness of Shea(she is darker in the books). Shea condemed Tyrion to death and never loved him. Casca on the other hand made Guts a father. You wouln´t see a bar-croud cheering a lot in a HBO Berserk adaptation. Sorry sylvester21 but you may have reached peak darkness in a long form manga/comic that is professionally published. The non-villain storys in Crossed are all slightly tamer and this is the closest peace of nihilism i can give you. If you like games i would recommend Silent Hill 2. Team Silent had brass ballZ for shure.

I also read EU/US comics and am a librarian.
Manga-Masters, My ANN-Lists + Imdb