Did you know digital games store Fanatical is doing comic and book bundles these days? They’re worth keeping an eye on—this month, for example, they’ve done a whole series of really excellent value horror comics deals that I’ve enjoyed taking advantage of.
But to keep this on the topic of games, there’s one bundle in particular I’m here to bring to your attention: The Witcher Build-Your-Own-Bundle.
It includes all the Dark Horse Witcher comics as digital trade paperbacks, as well as the recently translated original Polish comics, a Gwent artbook, and The World of the Witcher, a mighty reference guide to all the lore of the videogame series. The “build your own bundle” part just means you can choose which items you want, with the overall discount rising the more you buy. Of course, getting all of them nets you the best possible price per book.
It’s only $11.99 / £10.70 to get the whole lot, which has a total value of $208.84 / £156.40. That’s a huge saving, so it seems to be well worth going all-in unless you’re just trying to pick up a few books to complete an existing collection.
Dark Horse has been making comics based on The Witcher videogames and novels for over a decade now, and it’s pretty great at it. With its popular Hellboy series, the publisher has certainly had plenty of experience telling stories about gruff monster hunters facing grim peril, and its Witcher comics are at their best when they lean into the same kind of shadowy, fantasy-horror atmosphere.
Personally I really enjoyed the House of Glass, which sees Geralt stumble into a surreal and gothic haunted house story reminiscent of The Witcher 3’s Heart of Stone DLC. If you want more recommendations, our own Jody Macgregor made a ranking of the whole series just a couple of years back, with mini-reviews of almost every book in this bundle.
You receive the comics as PDFs, which isn’t as ideal as it could be—I always prefer .cbz files for their smaller size—but the image quality is perfect. Fanatical’s download pages are agreeably well-organised, too. If you’ve bought a Humble Bundle comic bundle before, you may have found it a surprising pain to download and sort it all, thanks to jumbled file lists and incorrectly labelled books. Here, they’re delivered in neat and sensible order with useful file names, so you can just bulk download them, drop them in a folder, and you’re ready to go with a minimum of fuss.
I’ve been really converted to digital comic reading in recent years. Get yourself a tablet and a good comic reader app (I use CDisplayEx), and it can be just as good as reading physically, with some huge upsides—like not having to worry about shelf space, and being able to stock up on the cheap with bundles like this. This bundle would be a great way to give it a go if you’ve never tried it.
You’ve got plenty of time to decide if you fancy exploring the world of Witcher comics, though—the bundle is set to run until the end of November.
