If one have been to take a look at what’s sizzling on Manga Plus, a manga-reading app crammed with banner titles like One Piece, Chainsaw Man, and Jujutsu Kaisen Modulo, they is perhaps led to consider that this trio is the motive the app is value downloading in a sea of studying apps that are extra of a monetization hassle than they’re worth. Nonetheless, the actual manga that make the app important aren’t these tenured shonen, however newer blood collection. Alongside MAD, one other manga collection that extra folks must be obsessive about is the darkish fantasy Centuria.
Reductively, Centuria, created by Tohru Kuramori, appears like a chimera of Makoto Yukimura‘s pacifist warrior odyssey, Vinland Saga, by the use of Kentaro Miura‘s brutal and melancholic masterpiece, Berserk. By itself deserves, nevertheless, studying the manga because it has developed from week to week since its debut in 2024 has been nothing wanting witnessing a literary powderkeg poised to push darkish fantasy into a brand new echelon after an period dominated by works that felt extra spinoff of Berserk than genuinely self‑outlined.
Centuria follows Julian, a boy with a really messed-up previous who finds himself as a stowaway on a ship crammed with slaves awaiting their freedom. There, he befriends his fellow slaves, most of all Mira, a pregnant girl who rekindles his religion not solely in humanity but in addition in his proper to stay a contented life. That is, till the shoe you’re ready to fall, having learn the earlier sentences, hits him like a Mack truck. His fellow slaves are massacred by the ship captain, and to make issues worse, an eldritch emerges from the sea. Throughout all the chaos, stated eldritch being makes a cut price with Julian, granting him supernatural skills by gifting him the mixed energy of his slaughtered mates in addition to their mixed lives. In essence, Julian turns into a quasi-immortal being: with each dying he suffers, he is resurrected, and his tally of 100 lives dwindles. Julian, in flip, indebted to his allies, makes use of his newfound energy to shield Mira’s new child daughter and his adoptive sister, Diana, from forces each human and otherworldly that need her for their very own ends as a mysterious “little one of prophecy.”
Watching Centuria broaden its world‑constructing week to week is a deal with in itself, branching outward like a precarious spiderweb crack throughout a windshield. Regardless of its reasonably brisk tempo, nothing feels out of left discipline; every chapter lands on both a healthful cliffhanger, an emotionally devastating beat, a large bombshell, or a intelligent subversion of the place you assumed the story was telegraphing itself to go. Somewhat than regaling readers with the properly‑trodden lone‑wolf‑and‑cub dynamic between Julian and Diana, Centuria pointedly refuses to make its hero a lonely, solemn scowler. As an alternative, it surrounds him with new allies who rapidly kind a discovered household—a village decided to rear the little one of prophecy the proper manner and battle tooth and nail to preserve her secure.
And it actually doesn’t damage that the collection is awash in a few of the most detailed background artwork in the medium. Kuramori’s aesthetic feels pulled straight from the medieval tapestry of knights in the Bayeux Tapestry, with textures virtually lifting off the web page as if chiseled from stone. Its double‑web page coloration spreads, in the meantime, evoke the haunting grandeur of Darkish Souls and Elden Ring‑tier vistas that, even when rendered in black ink on a white web page like some other manga, by no means fail to be equal elements awe‑hanging and terrifying.
One other enjoyable wrinkle in Centuria‘s intrigue past the literal story itself is that the collection is a part of a fairly cracked lineage of former assistants to Chainsaw Man creator Tatsuki Fujimoto. Granted, it’s fairly customary that the trajectory of turning into a mangaka means you seemingly served as an assistant underneath a much bigger mangaka. However for no matter motive, these in Fujimoto’s orbit have a tendency to have all branched out to make fairly distinctive collection all their very own that each one really feel like a counter-cultural affect of Fujimoto. To present pomp and circumstance to the Midas contact Fujimoto’s assistants have had since turning into their very own mangaka, right here’s a fast rundown of who they are and what they’ve made:
Likewise, Kuramori is a former assistant to each Fujimoto and Tatsu, having labored with the former on his one-shot manga, Goodbye Eri, and with the latter on a few chapters of Dandadan, and it exhibits. Centuria is teeming with spectacular character designs, intelligent energy units, and even a forged of villains that are endearing and price studying for, with arcs to rival these of its heroes.
One other hallmark of Fujimoto’s affect that’s unmistakable in Centuria is his penchant for drawing “cute girls,” which is as alive in Kuramori as in his different assistants, arguably extra so. At the very least, it’s one thing that’s impressed Tatsu sufficient to draw fan artwork of his assistant’s large feminine knight whereas imploring him not to observe in Fujimoto’s footsteps by killing her off.
ケントゥリア面白い・・・！
アンヴァルを殺さないでください・・・！ pic.twitter.com/IyJKDfZLit— 龍幸伸 (@TatuYukinobu) August 19, 2024
Over the two years of its serialization, Centuria‘s momentum as a must-read manga collection has proven no indicators of slowing. It’s even earned it a shortlist recommendation from Manga Plus editor-in-chief, Shuhei Hosono.
“It has each a fancy story and special-power battles, and I’ve little question it’s going to grow to be a masterpiece, so I hope extra folks give it a learn,” Hosono stated in the YouTube video linked above.
With the luck Fujimoto’s assistants have had getting the entire collection picked up and become a banner anime of their very own, hopefully, it’ll solely be a matter of time till an anime studio broadcasts they’re adapting it. So now’s pretty much as good a time as any to give it a learn and see what all the hubbub is about.
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