Welcome to the table. I’m going to go ahead and get this out of the way first, so that the review you are about to read for The Witcher: The Bear and the Butterfly #1 and #2 from Dark Horse Comics makes a little more sense. I have a degenerative disability. I use a manual wheelchair as my mobility aid full time, and when I was younger and still ambulatory, I was up on crutches when I could be. From a very young age I have navigated a world where “Tiny Tim” and “the kid with the crutch” were commonplace. Every school play, every community theater, every chance someone could, they were trying to put me in that box that sat somewhere between inspiration content and tokenism. I’ve never been much of an “inside the box” kind of person.
Living with a very visible and limiting disability has colored my view of the world. I don’t have a non-disabled perspective to draw from. I have never known a life that was “normal” or “comfortable” or “pain free.”
This informs my view on things and the reason for this entire preamble is because there is a young character within the pages of this comic that uses a mobility aid and has some insight on the disabled experience that I find both spot on to my experience and frankly fascinating that it made it to print, as this is not the typical kind representation I see in pop culture.
Let’s get into it.
The Witcher: The Bear and the Butterfly kicked off with our protagonist Geralt, a magically mutated monster hunter known as a Witcher, slaying a cockatrice and saving a farmhand. In the aftermath Geralt realizes that the farmhand, who is now missing an arm, was hunting a creature who has been plaguing the local town. As is his way, Geralt heads off to the nearby hub of civilization, a walled city with a thriving farming community, a wolf problem, and some kind of killer on the loose who is taking at least one victim a night in a way that seems to point to vampirism. Geralt encounters another hunter from the Bear clan, and a young woman who has been locked up for stealing and is set to be executed by hanging. The young woman’s name we learn is Tila, and we find out that she has seen a creature in the woods and claims to know where it hides.
What she describes to Geralt is fascinating as she describes a traditional vampire, complete with ashen skin, pointed ears, dark lips and eyes, and a great black cloak, but she also tells Geralt that this creature was watching the sunset, casts no shadow, and was communing with black-ish blue butterflies.
Geralt deduces in his typical fashion that this thing is a Superior Vampire, a creature that is nearly unkillable and incredibly rare.
What follows to finish out the end of issue #1 is a disabled kid, who we will learn in issue #2 is named Mot, doing his best to run from a pack of wolves led by a mutated tusked wolf. The towns folk hear Mot screaming and say, “Better a cripple than the Graf’s goats.”
Geralt makes quick work of the creatures, even using Mot’s crutch to slay their leader with a bit of magical enhancement to make sure there is no chance the thing will get back up and terrorize the countryside again. Mot grapples with why he was saved, and then follows Geralt back into town, only to find that another victim of the “vampire” has been found.
We are going to pause here as I want to address a few things that feel like they need to be addressed.
Firstly, I loathe the use of the word “crippled.”
It’s a term that is tossed around with reckless abandon, and as a kid it was used by children and adults as a slur for people who were disabled. I have felt the sting of it more times than I feel comfortable processing right now, but I can tell you from the bottom of my heart, as a disabled person, this is not a good word to use to describe someone who is disabled. I also dislike “handicapped,” but it does not have the cultural weight that the former term has and with signs, bathrooms, and doors having it emblazoned on its surface, it’s kind of difficult to avoid it even if I wanted to.
Additionally, the implication that Mot’s life is worth less than a goat because he is disabled is not something out of some farfetched fantasy world full of mutants and monsters. The value of a life that can not “produce,” be it laying bricks or fighting wars, is a tale as old as time, and in the current cultural landscape, the amount of people who feel this way is very visible across all facets of pop culture, social media, and news sites.
While the hate of something different in comics feels like it is as old as the genre itself, how this story evolves in issue #2 is not exactly something I was expecting.
Issue #2 of The Witcher: The Bear and the Butterfly kicks off with Mot chasing after Geralt the best he can and asking to be hired on as Geralt’s squire. Geralt being a loner of course tells the kid no, but Mot does his best to insist. As Mot is following after Geralt, Geralt learns that the wolves’ bodies go missing after they are slain and that Mot knows where they keep the bodies they burn who they suspect are victims of vampire attacks.
What follows after the first few pages is a very poignant conversation that, while short, feels very very tuned in to exactly what it feels like to live in a body that is not exactly traditional.
There is a lot to unpack on the above page and I think it’s worth getting into.
Panel one has Mot saying, “I can hobble awful fast. I barely need the crutch,” before he is cut off by Geralt who tells him that is not his concern. It’s telling that Mot immediately makes a plea that he is more than his disability and that he can be useful even if he moves slower than most. Geralt shows us who he is by not being fixated on the disability as that is not something he considers.
Geralt takes the second panel on this page to really nail this home to the reader – and to Mot – that it has nothing to do with anything about Mot, and has everything to do with the fact that Geralt works alone.
What happens in panel three could be coincidental but it feels so perfectly paced that I find it hard to believe whoever crafted this dialogue did not have some kind of insight into the world I live within.
Mot says, “Mutant.”
This is powerful for a number of reasons. In the world of the Witcher, the title characters are indeed mutants and due to a happenstance of birth and/or magical influences, they are kept at arms length from society. As someone who grew up with a bit of a chip on my shoulder because I had a genetic mutation that made me disabled and there was not a bald man in a yellow chair showing up to whisk me away to a school for gifted kids, the world mutant is a heavy thing.
In the confines of this story world, it’s an insult people hurl at Witchers to try and cause them shame or emotional harm. Mot being disabled and saying this as a slander gives the indication that he is trying to hurt Geralt because Geralt is hurting him by saying he can’t be his squire.
The word hangs in the panel like a dark cloud, and it’s even illustrated in such a way that it’s less defined than other text in the speech bubbles have been. It’s a very powerful panel in this particular conversation, because it shows that the right pacing in a comic can do wonders.
Panel four, however, reveals the intent behind the word; it’s not a slur, but Mot asking Geralt, “Ye called it a mutant. The wolf.”
This pivot shows that Mot is not like the rest of the villagers we have encountered, he is not going to insult or slander Geralt regardless of if Geralt is doing something he wants him to do or not.
It’s such a powerful use of sequential storytelling in such a small amount of panels to really dial in on exactly who both these characters are and how they regard each other. They have both dealt with judgment, they are both outside the normal confines of what would be considered traditional society in this story setting, and they are both trying to survive the horrors that plague this world.
Panel five reveals that Mot’s father died from a wolf attack a few months before the events of this story. Mot has no food or money, and panel six is devastatingly powerful and worthy of being unpacked.
Mot tells Geralt that he knows that folks are either too afraid of him or too greedy to help him. A disabled orphan child with no home is too frightening to armed villagers. Mot goes on to say he knows he will be dead in a week from either being slaughtered or starving from a lack of food if Geralt will not take him on as a squire.
I adore this because it is delivered in a matter of fact way that I, someone who has been hungry and had no safe place to rest my head, understands on a personal level.
Before allowing Geralt to answer, Mot also offers that he knows where the bodies are kept before they are put on the funeral pyres, and the page draws to a close with Geralt in the final panel of this page looking at Mot as the two stand in the snow.
The carefully crafted dialogue that plays across this page feels so lived in and layered that it is difficult not to believe it was intentional in its design. So often in pop culture media, disabled people seem to lack self-awareness or are full of a self-hatred that manifests in risk taking or poor decision-making skills. I direct you to a billionaire with an arc reactor pacemaker or the tortured bald mutation with mental powers who pines for the ability to walk when he could dance among the stars with merely a thought. These are the ways disabled people who are not in a “very special episode” are categorized, so having this level of frank and authentic dialogue caught me off guard and delighted me to no end.
The issue continues along after this spectacular page, and Geralt and Mot go investigate the body believed to have been killed by a vampire. There is some visual storytelling that seems to indicate that there were claws that ripped into the throat of this body and not fangs, and then another Witcher shows up again causing an alarm with the guards watching the body and eventually resulting in Geralt paying to free the young woman, Tila, he spoke with back in issue #1.
Tila, Geralt, and Mot head off into the wilds to a cottage in the woods that Tila tells them belonged to a priestess and a druid who eloped together ages ago. Geralt pokes a few holes in her story and we get the impression that there is not a vampire at work here, or if there is, it’s not the one who is doing all the killing.
The other Witcher from the Bear Clan ambushes Geralt and the two fight a bit, with Geralt making the claim that his new foe is not actually a Witcher, an accusation that is met with a wry smile from the big man from the Bear Clan.
Before that plot point can be dug into to deeply, though, mutant wolves attack. As Gerald fights them off, the Bear Clan member flees after killing two of the three mounts used by our protagonist party. The wolves are attacked by a swarm of butterflies who strip them to the bone and chase off the remaining stragglers, and then the issue draws to a close with the butterflies leaving now skeletal corpses of the riding rams that Mot and Tila were using.
There’s a lot of plot information injected in each page of this issue and even with the quickness that the story plates out in these 30ish pages, it feels very fulfilling and well paced as far as the reading goes.
Between the brilliant one page that feels award worthy in my humble opinion, the dazzling art done by Stephen Green on lines and José Villarrubia on colors, with Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou on lettering and Simon Spurrier on story, this issue is one of the best sword & sorcery-themed comics and easily the best video game-themed comic I have ever had the pleasure of reading.
I’m so locked in on this story and these characters now that I am actually chewing the inside of my mouth as I wait for the next issue to drop.
Until next time, If you have not picked up a Witcher book before or if you have even a passing interest in fantasy storytelling in the sword & sorcery space, this is a really solid book that I am wholeheartedly urging you to pick up. I, for one, will be grabbing it in floppies and in a collected form if they release one.
Creative Team: Simon Spurrier (Writer), Stephen Green (Artist), José Villarrubia (Colorist), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (Letterer)
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
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