Dark Horse has been publishing a variety of Witcher comics, some direct adaptations of the original stories, some based on the videogame canon, one reimagining Geralt as a yokai-hunting manga hero. Right now there's a five-issue miniseries coming out about Geralt's retirement adventures as a vineyard magnate following The Witcher 3's final expansion, Blood & Wine.
What English-speaking Witcher enjoyers haven't had the chance to read, however, are the first run of Witcher comics first published in Poland from 1993 to 1995. These six comics included retellings of the classic short stories like The Lesser Evil and The Last Wish, as well as more oddball cuts, like a story about Geralt's mother and a flashback to his training that depicts the betrayal of the Cat School of witchers, which was based on an outline provided by author Andrzej Sapkowski rather than one of his completed works.
Illustrated by Bogusław Polch, who also provided cover art for some of the novels and illustrations that accompanied the short stories when they first appeared in Fantastyka magazine, these comics provide a pre-videogame idea of what Geralt and his supporting cast looked like. While Yennefer is immediately recognizable, the elves have eyelashes halfway to Zerrikania and Geralt is rocking a topknot and bangs that look like a post-breakup hairstyle he's already regretting.
Dark Horse's English-language translation will be available in a single 296-page volume called The Witcher: Classic Collection, and will be released on March 18, 2025. That's a fair way out, but there's already a preorder up on Amazon.
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Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor
Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.
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