Character · Berserk
Puck
The comic relief in the bleakest manga on the shelf, which is a job that ought to come with hazard pay.
In Otakana the clue reads: Elf who travels with the black swordsman
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Berserk
- Letters
- 4 · Normal
Puck is an elf about the size of a hand, out of a hidden valley, and he attaches himself to Guts in the first volume by the simple method of not leaving. He heals wounds by shedding dust from his wings, which makes him useful, and he narrates the horror around him with a running commentary, which makes it bearable.
Kentaro Miura draws him in a completely different style from everything else on the page. When the panels go grim, Puck flattens into a round little cartoon and pulls faces. It is a deliberate release valve: a reader can only take so many pages of a man being eaten before the book has to let some air in, and Puck is the air.
He works as a witness too. Guts explains almost nothing about himself, so the elf asks the questions a reader would ask, gets snapped at, and asks again. Later in the series he travels with Schierke and the rest of the group and stops being the only voice, but the early volumes belong to him and to the swordsman he refuses to leave alone.
Spelling PUCK
PUCK is four letters and finishes on the CK pair, which is where short answers hide. He shares a name with the sprite from A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the Japanese パック, pakku, holds a doubled consonant that English collapses into CK. One vowel, one U, nothing else to decide once you have the P.