4 out of 5

I couldn’t tell ya’ if The Witcher comic book vibes with The Witcher video game or not: I’ve only played about 15 minutes of the first game.  However, I can say that Witcher doesn’t read at all like an adaptation; one doesn’t have to lower their expectations to allow for fan pandering in order to enjoy the read.  …Which is sorta what you’re aiming for (in my mind) when it comes to adapting another’s characters: it should feel like its your own story, but with enough history that you can accept that its roots lie elsewhere.

Tobin ably explains the Witchers too us through incidental conversation: magicians; hunters.  That’s all we really need to know.  And regarding our featured Witcher, Geralt – while he shares his designation’s general trait of a lack of emotions, we learn (in what is presumably a reference to the games) that he differs slightly, with a bit more empathy than would be the norm.  Doesn’t stop him from being a cold-hearted womanizer, necessarily, but that’s not something we dwell on so much in this mini, besides some amusing moments where we join the conversation at the end of an anecdote Geralt is telling, about thwarting danger or bedding the lasses.

Geralt runs across Jakob outside of some haunted woods.  Jakob points to a woman in the distance and claims that it’s his dead wife Marta, taken long ago by some beasty, now forever haunting Jakob.  But the two seem to bond over an understanding of the isolated lifestyle; they end up traveling through some haunted woods and are chased – by forest creepies – toward a house deep in the forest.  Geralt’s vibey medallion gives off some vibes.  Marta hangs around, watching them; the house seems to harbor a succubus, Vara, and there’s always fresh food prepared at various banquet halls.  Go wandering further and you might find some corpses in the cellar.  And as Jakob and Geralt remain, the former occasionally trying to corner his wife, get her to speak, the latter exploring the house with Vara, we learn more about the whats and whys of this house, and of what might be going on with Jakob.  This is expertly paced and balanced by Tobin: somehow the mini remains compelling without having to fall back on an obvious mystery or bad guy to fight, and the environments by Joe Querio are perfectly moody – similar to but decidedly different from his more lively work in BPRD.  Colorist Carlos Badilla gives the pages an inviting warmth that bows down to shadows and chills at the right moments.

When the curtain drops in the last issue, the talking head explanation works, but some of the pieces start to feel a little jammed together – Vara’s motivations are unclear, and Jakob’s personality is a bit too “here’s the twist” flip-floppy.  Though these are the exceptions we make when formatting stories for divvied up comics.  Series like BPRD or Hellboy get a pass because they’ve had years of building up the world and style to get away with such narrative abbreviations, but as this is the lone example of Witcher (thus far… though it would lend itself well to a Hellboy / older BPRD ongoing mini-series format), the imbalance of the conclusion versus the perfectly paced first four issues sticks out.  Still, Tobin didn’t just take the easy route for this book: ‘Witcher’ is the legit deal, something capable of standing on its own without a video game to back it up.