Wasn't duranki drawn entirely by the assistants? To my knowledge Miura was only dealing with the storyboards and maybe some artwork corrections.
No, not entirely. As you said, Miura did the storyboarding (called the "names"), which is pretty significant. Studio Gaga finished it from there. But that's not how things were going with Berserk, which he exerted a much tighter grip on in terms of quality control. From an interview about
Duranki in 2019:
"For Berserk I do almost everything myself, the characters and the backgrounds. I only give them the toning, buildings, soldiers, backgrounds, etc. These days I let them do the ground too."
Duranki was intended as a project to build up the skill of Studio Gaga, so that they could eventually help out with Berserk.
"My staff is competent but I still draw almost every part myself, so it brings out more and more delays. So I hope my assistants' skills will grow with Duranki, so I get to think "this is good enough". So this can make me consider using them more for Berserk, and then I hope Berserk's publication speed will get faster."
But Duranki eventually ceased. It was released pretty consistently, bi-monthly, from Sept 2019 until May 2020, but hasn't seen a release in more than a year. While we can't know what happened behind the scenes with its production, it's not much of a logical leap to consider that Miura halted it down because it wasn't meeting his expectations. The whole creative exercise was about quality control.
Miura was extremely careful about what went on the pages of Berserk. As of 2019, he didn't trust his assistants to contribute major art to it. So he created a new series to hone their talents, then it stopped. Nothing about that circumstance bodes well for that group inheriting ALL of Berserk's responsibilities, even in the best of circumstances. But we're in the worst possible circumstance—Miura left without any warning, and without a plan in place.
And in his own words, his creative process didn't involve documented plans for how to specifically execute things:
"I don't ever write dialogue ahead of time." (Guidebook, 2016). We know that he had a broad outline about Berserk that he had been following since the beginning (referenced in the 2019 Glénat interview). But whether that existed only in his head or in a locked box marked "in case of death, use this" is unknown, and likely will be forever.
Which brings us to another big point — we don't know what Miura's own wishes would be in this scenario. But we can guess them from how he treated Berserk and who contributed. Would he really want the team who he had barely let touch Berserk's primary art to take over not only
all the art, but also the storytelling? The dialogue? I genuinely don't think he'd want them touching the legacy he left behind, potentially toward disaster, just for the sake of meandering across a finish line that would never be authoritative.
I'll give you an example for where this would become extremely problematic for fans. I'm sure you remember the Grunbeld light novel, which was awful. One of the main problems fans had with this book was that it was initially unclear how much Miura had contributed, beyond the art (which was great!). Where did it tumble into such a terrible state? Where did Miura's ideas end and Makoto Fukami's (the writer) ideas begin? We can't know, and it is painful. Now, imagine that instead of the low quality being relegated to a light novel which fans can write off as an unfortunate side story, it's the main series. We could never know where Miura's ideas ended and the new staff's ideas began. We'd be forever in limbo of what is authoritative and what is not. And it's a scenario with a high likelihood of ruining the legacy of Berserk.
I remember reading somewhere that he let many details come to him in the moment which probably was why his work was so great.
It's from a variety of interviews, but
here's one from 2000 where he says so pretty explicitly (translation was not by Puella, for info):
–Wow… hearing this stuff is really amazing. You say you didn’t really have things clearly planned out at first, and yet every little thing fits so snuggly into place without any plotholes, as if you’d had it all figured out from the start. It’s a great mixture of the intuitive and the logical.
Miura: It’s true, lately I’ve come to trust in my own carelessness. In my experience things often pop nicely into place even without having been planned ahead much. I do think it probably wouldn’t go very smoothly if I were to work with stuff that isn’t
me, stuff that I’ve borrowed from elsewhere and simply stuck in, but there’s hardly any of that. Even when I do bring in something from elsewhere, I run it through myself and quality test it before using it.
They should only continue if Miura left some disposition, and some matrials behind.
This is well-wishing without considering the specifics of the execution—the day to day. What constitutes "some materials"? Miura didn't script things out like that, as noted above. And whoever inherited such a task would inevitably have to make hundreds of decisions in each episode, let alone for the remainder of the series, attempting to intuit what Miura would have done. It could never be authoritative.
. I remember reading that the only contribution of Miura in that novel was the artwork.
