Centuria is a dark fantasy manga that more people should be obsessed with

If one looks at what’s hot on Manga Plus, a manga reading app full of banner titles like One piece, A man with a chainsawand Ju-jutsu Kaisen Modulothey might be led to believe that this trio is why the app is worth downloading amidst a sea of ​​reading apps that are more monetization hassles than they’re worth. However, the real manga that makes the app important are not those titular shonen, but newer blood series. okay CRAZYAnother manga series that more people should be obsessed with is Dark Fantasy century.

reductively, centurycreated by Toru Kuramori, it looks like a chimera of Makoto Yukimura’s pacifist warrior odyssey, Vinland Sagathrough Kentaro Miura’s brutal and melancholic masterpiece, furious. On its own, though, reading the manga as it progressed week by week since its debut in 2024 was nothing short of witnessing a literary powder keg ready to push dark fantasy into a new echelon after an era dominated by works that felt more derivative of Berserk than truly self-defined.

century follows Julian, a boy with a truly messed-up past who finds himself stranded on a ship full of slaves waiting for their freedom. There he befriends his fellow slaves, most notably Mira, a pregnant woman who rekindles his faith not only in humanity but in his right to live a happy life. That is, until the shoe you’ve been waiting to drop after reading the previous sentences hits him like a Mack truck. His fellow slaves are slaughtered by the ship’s captain, and to make matters worse, a great man rises from the sea. During all the chaos, said strange being makes a deal with Julian, granting him supernatural abilities, giving him the combined power of his slain friends as well as their combined lives. In essence, Julian becomes a near-immortal being: with each death he suffers, he is resurrected and his 100 life count decreases. Julian, in turn, beholden to his allies, uses his newfound power to protect Mira’s newborn daughter and his adopted sister, Diana, from human and otherworldly forces who want her for their own purposes as a mysterious « child of the prophecy. »

Watching century expanding world-building week after week is a pleasure in itself, branching out like a precarious cobweb, a crack in the windshield. Despite its moderately brisk pace, nothing feels out of left field; each chapter lands on either a wholesome cliffhanger, an emotionally devastating beat, a giant bombshell, or a clever subversion of where you assumed the story was telegraphed to go. Instead of delighting readers with the well-trodden lone wolf-wolf dynamic between Julian and Diana, century emphatically refuses to turn his character into a lonely, solemn sullen man. Instead, he surrounds himself with new allies who quickly form a solid family—a village determined to raise the child of prophecy the right way and fight tooth and nail to keep her safe.

And it certainly doesn’t hurt that the series is packed with some of the most detailed background imagery in media. Kuramori’s aesthetic sensibilities are drawn straight from the medieval tapestry of knights in the Bayeux Tapestry, with textures that practically lift off the page as if carved from stone. Its two-sided flower branches, meanwhile, evoke the haunting majesty of Dark souls and Elden Ring– layered vistas that, even when rendered in black ink on a white page like any other manga, never cease to be equal parts striking and terrifying.

Another fun wrinkle in the centuryThe intrigue beyond the literal story itself is that the series is part of a rather fractured legacy of former assistants to A man with a chainsaw creator Tatsuki Fujimoto. Of course, it’s pretty standard that the trajectory of becoming a mangaka means that you probably served as an assistant to a bigger mangaka. But for whatever reason, those in Fujimoto’s orbit tend to all branch out to make quite unique series, all their own, which all feel like Fujimoto’s countercultural influence. To add pomp and circumstance to the Midas touch that Fujimoto’s assistants have had since becoming mangaka in their own right, here’s a brief description of who they are and what they’ve done:

So is Kuramori a former assistant to both Fujimoto and Tatsu, having worked with the former on his one-off manga, Goodbye Erieand with the latter on several heads of tasteand it shows. century brims with impressive character designs, clever power-ups, and even a cast of villains that are likeable and worth reading, with arcs to rival those of its heroes.

Another hallmark of Fujimoto’s influence that is unmistakable in century is his penchant for drawing “cute girls” which is as alive in Kuramori as in his other assistants, perhaps more. At the very least, it’s something that impressed Tatsu enough to draw a fan art of the hulking female knight on his assistant, while begging him not to follow in Fujimoto’s footsteps by killing her.

Centuria is interesting…!
Please don’t kill Anvar…! pic.twitter.com/IyJKDfZLit

— TatuYukinobu (@TatuYukinobu) August 19, 2024

During the two years of its serialization, centuryThe momentum of the must-read manga series shows no signs of slowing down. It even earned him 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 will become a masterpiece, so I hope more people will read it, » Hosono said in the YouTube video linked above.

With the luck that Fujimoto’s assistants have had to pick up the entire series and turn it into their own anime, hopefully it will only be a matter of time before an anime studio announces that they are adapting it. So now is the best time to read it and see what all the fuss is about.

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