Crosmando: I wonder if Miura has an assistant or something who could possibly carry on his work, I know many manga artists have assistants who do backgrounds and other work, and are talented artists in their own right. I know Nihei had an amazing assistant (Q. Hayashida) who eventually went on to make her own manga (Dorohedoro). But I guess not because the art just wouldn't be the same.
Well, there was some speculation that smaller scale projects like Gigantomachia were intended to train his assistants to work more independently on Berserk chapters, although that could just be wishful thinking on fans' part. And even if there was a contingency plan in place and had the significant points planned out it still might not be possible to continue the series or it would suffer a severe drop in quality.
Shirow Masamune and Rikido Koshi's current series is being done by their assistants, after Rikido Koshi stepped back to a "Series Composition" role due to health issues (Shirow Masamune's basically like that one guy on every school project that only shows up at the first planning meeting and never again, leaving all the work to everyone else but still getting credit for it. Just because it's apparently set in one of the GitS universes.) So there's some precedent. Though that's probably still not all that comparable to this situation since they would naturally have a lot more structure/guidance/feedback, and the art is a lot simpler by several orders of magnitude.
mrcrispy83: (edit: how do I get someone to change the topic title to get rid of the typo?)
Frambooos: Fixed it!
Thanks.