As part of WitcherCon, CD Projekt Red has announced a Kickstarter pre-launch campaign for The Witcher Ronin, a full-length manga from CDPR. Author Rafa Jaki is teaming up with Japanese illustrator Hataya for this gorgeous-looking new project and IGN was able to speak with Jaki about the manga ahead of the official announcement.
The Witcher Ronin is an upcoming, full-length Witcher manga written by Rafa Jaki, who worked as CDPRs Comic Book editor for eight years, co-created the fictional card game Gwent, and is developing the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 anime, Edgerunners. The illustrations for the manga are handled primarily by Hataya, a manga artist best-known for Neko no Matasaburou and Mangaka Joshi.
The manga will tell a standalone Elseworld story, unrelated to the video game storylines, meaning it won't be a story where Geralt from The Witcher is magically teleported from his world to Japan by magic. Instead, Jaki took inspiration from stories like Superman Red Son and Batman Ninja to take an established character and put them in a new setting.
Jaki says putting Geralt in a fantastical Japanese setting was an interesting exercise since Japanese folklore also has a rich tradition of monsters known as yokai. And that tradition formed a bridge that connected Geralt with the new setting.
I personally love the new monsters and folk tales we can experiment with, Jaki says. Both Europe and Japan have a unique tradition in this area, and bringing iconic Japanese stories and monsters and fitting them in a Witcher Context was the most exciting thing for me.
There were some challenges to consider. For example, the term Witcher itself would not necessarily fit into the Japanese setting. But Jaki says he decided to lean on the precedent set by past Elseworld comics to solve this problem.
We took cues from other Elseworld comics where, for example in Superman Red Son even though Superman lands in the CCCP instead of Kansas, [in the] U.S. he is still called Superman its an artistic license that allows people to have fun with the concept and understand it easily.
Melding together The Witcher and Japanese fantasy isnt new. CD Projekt has a line of high-end figures that already do it. But the idea to put Geralt in a Japanese fantasy world actually pre-dates both the figure and manga.
The Origins of The Witcher Manga The origin of The Witcher manga really began when Jaki went to the PlayStation Awards in Tokyo back in 2015 with studio head Adam Badowski.
Jaki, who also has a degree in Japanese philosophy at Warsaw University, mentioned that he always thought Geralt had a lot in common with the Japanese ronin (wandering swordsman), and before heading to Tokyo, Jaki and Badowski got studio artist Robert Adler to design a pair of custom t-shirts with an illustration of Geralt as a ronin to wear to the gala event.
