The Witcher Comics to Read to Get Ready for Season 2

For starters, there’s The Witcher: House of Glass by Paul Tobin, with art by Joe Querio. It’s a standalone story that launched the current run of Witcher comics. While traveling through the forest, Geralt meets a man being stalked by his long-dead wife. The pair seek shelter in a nearby house that’s more than meets the eye.

There are elements of other stories like “A Grain of Truth” from The Last Wish—which will be featured in next season of the TV show. It’s a formula that works well, and House of Glass tells its own story that tackles one of the issues Witcher does best: examining that often-fuzzy line between man and monster. For those looking for more Witcher, it’s a good start.

Fox Children is based on a short story from the Season of Storms collection, a new anthology published years after the main Witcher series. However, like House of Glass, it’s a standalone story. Geralt signs on to help a ship through a monster-infested swamp, but soon learns that there’s more to the situation. The ship has taken the child of a swamp creature, and the creature will stop at nothing to get the child back.

It’s a fun story with an almost horror-aspect, as the crew of the ship are slowly picked off by the denizens of the marshlands. And, like House of Glass, it’s a fun visual showcase of creatures like leshens and vodyanoy.

Curse of Crows is a pretty good Witcher story, but it’s very much one meant for fans of the games. The book follows the game’s distinctive bearded Geralt and adult-Ciri in the time period of the third game: The Wild Hunt. It’s still an enjoyable story about Geralt and Ciri working to fight against a striga—one of the more memorable monsters from the books and Season 1 of the show—but the setting is likely to throw those expecting the book or TV show versions of those characters for a loop.

Of Flesh and Flame has two strong things going for it: Dandelion (or Jaskier if you’re coming from the show) and journeying into Ofir. The Witcher series rarely strays too far from the Eastern Europe-inspired Continent, so it’s fun to read the Witcher’s take on a fantasy setting that draws more inspiration from Arabian Nights than Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Geralt and Dandelion find themselves in over their heads as a magical trunk takes them both to a land where the brutish pragmatism of the Continent is traded for deeply steeped and honored traditions that aren’t dismissed as quickly as those in the typical Witcher setting. The story is, in a lot of ways, a follow up on the Hearts of Stone DLC for The Witcher 3, though, so if you haven’t played that there may be elements of the comic that you miss, but it’s nothing too substantial.

The most recent of the Witcher stories, Fading Memories, came out this past August and—like some of the best of the earlier comics—tackles some of the series’ more hard-hitting themes. Here, a town is afflicted with a curse that’s causing the disappearance of the town’s children, but there are also indicators that crop up over the issues that might indicate that the cure is worse than the disease.

The Witcher series is at its best when Geralt struggles to navigate, which Fading Memories handles really well. Fading Memories is a pretty grim tale, but it’s incredibly effective in showing a complex moral dilemma that defines the series as more than just “Geralt shows up and kills a monster.” There are some pretty good Witcher comics, but Fading Memories is likely among the best.

Get past the chainmail bikini cheese and what you’ll find in Gail Simone’s Red Sonja run are stories of an adventurer haunted by their past, traveling from town to town taking coin to solve monstrous problems. Like with The Witcher, those problems are rarely ethically black-and-white, and in Queen of Plagues in particular the great swordplay is mixed with some great character drama.

It already got a shoutout on our Top 50 Graphic Novels list, but Berserk is probably the series that best rivals the Witcher in the “loner wanderer and master swordsman struggles with enemies both cosmic and mundane” subgenre. Guts’ tale is one to match the bleakness of Geralt’s beat-for-beat.

Mike Mignola did some of the covers for a few of the Witcher comics above, so it’s only fitting that he’s listed here; it’s easy to see why. Mignola’s Hellboy series is an easy recommendation for fans of The Witcher, with both the same grim humor and widespread knowledge of folklore and mythology. If you’re looking for some good-old-fashioned curse lifting, Hellboy is your go-to.

If you dragged Geralt of Rivia into the 20th century and stuck a cigarette in his mouth, you’d end up with something close to the protagonist of Hellblazer. Like Geralt, Constantine battles the supernatural, and most often in the most gritty, foul-mouthed ways imaginable as he just barely manages to keep his own life together in the process.

One of the best parts of The Witcher is seeing new twists on familiar classics, like Beauty and the Beast or Snow White. If that aspect appeals to you, you’re going to have a hell of a time with Fables. In this long-running series, various fairy tale denizens have fled their home and set up a new magically hidden borough in New York. But despite sharing their refugee status, there are bitter old rivalries between many of these storied characters, and only a quasi-reformed Big Bad Wolf keeps the peace.

Alright alright, this isn’t a comic so it’s a bit outside of my jurisdiction, but if you’re a Witcher fan and you’ve made it this far and are still looking for more, check out the Warhammer Fantasy series. Like Geralt, Thulmann’s journeys take him from town to town investigating various sorts of occult or monstrous activities. And like Geralt, Thulmann is as often feared by the locals as much as the creatures he’s hunting. Thulmann’s books also have a keen eye for bringing elements of investigation and mystery into the stories, where the readers are given clues and—like the monster hunting protagonists—can follow along and unravel the plot.