reductively, CenturiaCreated by Tohru Kuramori, it feels like Makoto Yukimura’s vision of a pacifist warrior odyssey. vinland sagaThrough Kentaro Miura’s brutal and melancholy masterpiece, fearless. However, on its own merits, reading the manga that has evolved week by week since its debut in 2024 is nothing less than looking at a literary powderkeg, ready to push dark fantasy into a new echelon after an era that felt more derivative of Berserk than truly self-defining.
Centuria Follows Julian, a boy with a really messed up past who finds himself as a fugitive on a ship full of slaves waiting for their freedom. There, he befriends his fellow slaves, especially Meera, a pregnant woman, who awakens his faith not only in humanity but also in his right to live a happy life. That is, until the shoe you’ve been waiting for to drop after reading the previous sentences drops on it like a Mack truck. Her fellow slaves are murdered by the ship’s captain, and to make matters worse, an elder emerges from the sea. During all the chaos, Eldritch made a deal with Julian, granting him superhuman abilities by gifting him the combined power of his murdered friends as well as their combined lives. In essence, Julian becomes a semi-immortal being: with each death he is resurrected, and his number of 100 lives is reduced. Julian, in turn, indebted to his allies, uses his new power to protect Mera’s newborn daughter and her adopted sister, Diana, from both human and supernatural forces who want her for their own purposes as a mysterious “child of prophecy”.
Watching Centuria Expanding its world-building from week to week is a joy in itself, branching outward like a precarious spiderweb crack on a windshield. Despite its moderately fast pace, nothing feels out of left field; Each chapter lands on either a perfect cliffhanger, an emotionally devastating beatdown, a huge bombshell, or a clever subversion of where you assumed the story was telegraphing itself to go. Instead of captivating readers with the lone wolf and cub going on between Julian and Diana, Centuria clearly refuses to make his hero a lonely, grim satirist. Instead, it surrounds him with new allies who quickly form an established family – a village determined to fight tooth and nail to raise the prophetic child right and keep him safe.
And it certainly doesn’t hurt that the series is filled with some of the most detailed background art in the medium. The aesthetic of Kuramori is drawn directly from the medieval tapestry of the Knights in the Bayeux Tapestry, with the texture practically rising off the page as if chiseled from stone. Its double-page color spreads, meanwhile, highlight the haunting grandeur dark Souls And alden ring‑level visuals, which never fail to be equally awe-inspiring and terrifying even when presented in black ink on a white page like any other manga.
Another fun annoyance CenturiaThe intrigue beyond the literal story is that the series is part of a very broken lineage of former assistants chainsaw man Producer Tatsuki Fujimoto. Granted, it’s fairly standard that the trajectory of becoming a mangaka means you probably worked as an assistant under a big mangaka. But whatever the reason, everyone who was in Fujimoto’s orbit has gone on to create their own very unique series, which all feel like Fujimoto’s counter-cultural influence. To give Midas Touch the pomp and circumstance Fujimoto’s assistants have received since becoming their own mangaka, here’s a quick description of who they are and what they’ve created:
so is kuramori Former assistant to both Fujimoto and Tatsuo, who worked with Fujimoto on his one-shot manga, goodbye eriand on some chapters with the latter punishment-punishmentand it shows. Centuria It’s filled with impressive character designs, clever power sets, and even a cast of villains who are charming and worth the read to give its heroes a run for their money.
Another hallmark of Fujimoto’s influence that is undeniable Centuria His interest in painting “cute girls”which is equally alive in Kurmori Among his other assistants, arguably even more so. At least, it’s something that impressed Tatsuo so much that he drew fan art of his assistant’s giant female knight and urged him not to follow in Fujimoto’s footsteps by killing him.
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Please do not kill me. pic.twitter.com/IyJKDfZLit– 龍幸伸 (@TatuYukinobu) 19 August 2024
Within two years of its serialization, CenturiaIt shows no signs of slowing down as a must-read manga series. It even received a shortlist recommendation from Manga Plus editor-in-chief Shuhei Hosono.
“It has both a complex story and special-power battles, and I have no doubt that it’s going to be a masterpiece, so I hope more people will read it,” Hosono said in the YouTube video linked above.
Luckily Fujimoto’s assistants picked up the entire series and turned it into their own banner anime, hopefully, it will only be a matter of time until an anime studio announces that they are adapting it. So now is a good time to read it and see what all the fuss is about.
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