If one were to check what’s hot on Manga Plus, it’s a manga reading app full of banner titles like One piece, The Chainsaw Managain Jujutsu Kaisen Modulethey might be led to believe that these three are the reason the app is worth downloading in a sea of learning apps that are more money-making trouble than they are worth. However, the real manga that makes the app important is not these shonen, but the new blood series. On the side YOU ARE CRAZYanother manga series that many people should worry about is dark dream Centuria.
By shrinking, Centuriacreated by Tohru Kuramori, it feels like a chimera of Makoto Yukimura’s pacifist hero odyssey, The Vinland Sagain the form of Kentaro Miura’s brutal and brilliant art, Berserk. With your help, though, reading the manga as it’s changed week by week since it debuted in 2024 was like seeing a powderkeg ready to push dark fiction into a new echelon after an era dominated by works that sounded like they came out of Berserk rather than true self-expression.
Centuria follows Julian, a boy with a troubled past who finds himself a pirate on a ship full of slaves awaiting their freedom. There, he befriends his fellow servants, especially Mira, a pregnant woman who renews his faith not only in humanity but in his right to live a happy life. That is, until the shoe you’re waiting to drop, read the previous sentences, hits it like a Mack truck. His fellow slaves are killed by the ship’s captain, and to make matters worse, a dritch rises from the sea. In the midst of all this chaos, the eldritch said he made a deal with Julian, giving him supernatural abilities by giving him the combined power of his slain friends and their combined lives. In effect, Julian becomes an immortal: for every death he hears, he is resurrected, and his 100 lives decrease. Julian, indebted to his allies, uses his new powers to protect Mira’s newborn daughter and adopted sister, Diana, from the forces of humans and other worlds who seek him for their own purposes as the mysterious “prophetic child”.
Watching Centuria expanding its world-building week is an interesting thing in itself, connecting outwards like a spider’s web across a windshield. Despite its fast pace, nothing sounds out of left field; Each chapter rests on a beautiful cliffhanger, an emotionally devastating beat, a huge bombshell, or a clever subversion when you thought the story would teleport itself. Rather than introducing readers to the well-trodden wolf and cub between Julian and Diana, Centuria he clearly refuses to make its hero a lonely, modest criminal. Instead, he is surrounded by new friends who quickly form a found family—a village determined to raise the prophetic child right and fight tooth and nail to protect him.
And it certainly doesn’t hurt that the series is packed with some of the most detailed background art in the medium. Kuramori’s aesthetic feels drawn from the medieval tapestry of the knights in the Bayeux Tapestry, with the motifs rising from the page as if carved in stone. Its two-page color spread, meanwhile, evokes the wonderful beauty of Dark Souls again Elden Ring‑ tier vistas that, even if rendered in black ink on a white page like any other manga, never fail to balance the surprising and terrifying parts.
Another fun wrinkle CenturiaThe irony beyond the story itself is that this thread is part of a list of former assistants The Chainsaw Man creator Tatsuki Fujimoto. Granted, it’s a good idea that the path to becoming a mangaka means that you might work as an assistant under a great mangaka. But for whatever reason, those in Fujimoto’s orbit tend to all come together to make a pretty unique series that all feels like Fujimoto’s counter-cultural influence. To give glamor and status to the Midas touch of Fujimoto’s assistants since they became their mangaka, here’s a quick list of who they are and what they’ve done:
Similarly, Kuramori former assistant to both Fujimoto and Tatsu, having worked with the former on his one-shot manga, Goodbye Eriand the latter in several chapters of Dandadanand it shows. Centuria it’s full of impressive character designs, clever power sets, and even a bunch of likable and must-read villains, with arcs that rival its heroes.
Another sign of Fujimoto’s influence is unmistakable Centuria his way of painting “pretty girls,” living in Kuramori as to some of his assistants, no doubt more. At least, something that impressed Tatsu enough to draw fan art of his super hero assistant while urging him not to follow in Fujimoto’s footsteps by killing him.
KENTULIA is funny・・・・
アンヴルを殺さplease not・・・・! pic.twitter.com/IyJKDfZLit— 龍幸伸 (@TatuYukinobu) August 19, 2024
In the two years of its planning, Centuriamomentum as a must-read manga series has shown no signs of slowing down. It even earned 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 be a masterpiece, so I hope many people will read it,” Hosono said in the YouTube video linked above.
Luckily Fujimoto’s assistants found the rest of the series and turned it into their own banner anime, hopefully it will only be a matter of time until the anime studio announces that they are fixing it. So now is as good a time as any to read it and see what all the hubbub is about.
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