What to Read After Vinland Saga: 8 Manga and Comics That Hit the Same

Vinland Saga doesn't work because of the raids. It works because the raids cost something. A father who chose mercy and died for it, a son who spent years sharpening himself into a weapon for revenge, and then the slow horror of realizing the revenge was empty. When the story let go of me, that was the thing I missed. The weight. These eight reads give it back.

So where do you go when you've sat with the last page and you still want to live in that world? I sorted these by what made Vinland Saga land for you. The top is for readers who came for the history, the dirt and steel of a real era done right. Then the ones about violence and what it takes out of a person. Then the myth, for anyone who felt the old gods hovering just off the page and wished they'd step into frame.

For the history and the weight

1. Vagabond, by Takehiko Inoue

Read this first if it was the realism and the inner life of a violent man that gripped you. Inoue's fictionalized telling of the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi follows a wild Sengoku-era killer trying to become something more than a killer. The art is some of the best ever put to paper, brush-inked and alive. It asks the exact question Thorfinn ends up asking: what is all this strength even for?

2. Kingdom, by Yasuhisa Hara

If you loved watching Vinland Saga's world widen from one boy's grudge into armies and politics, Kingdom is your next thousand pages. It's a fictionalized account of China's Warring States period, following a war orphan named Xin who claws his way up toward becoming the greatest general under the heavens. Huge battles, real strategy, and the same slow climb from nobody to somebody that drives Thorfinn.

3. Golden Kamuy, by Satoru Noda

A soldier who survived the Russo-Japanese War teams up with an Ainu girl to hunt a stash of stolen gold across Hokkaido. Noda did years of research, and it shows in every page of Ainu culture, hunting, and food. It's violent, it's funny in a way that earns its laughs, and like Vinland Saga it treats a real time and place as something worth getting right.

For the violence and what it costs

4. Berserk, by Kentaro Miura

If the revenge arc cut you, this is the deeper cut. Guts is a mercenary swordsman dragged through betrayal and loss into a hunt that nearly eats him alive. Miura's dark-fantasy world is rougher and stranger than Vinland Saga's, but the spine is the same: a man defined by violence, slowly working out whether there's anything left of him underneath it. Be warned, the back half is heavy.

5. Vinland Saga's quieter cousin: the back half of Vinland Saga itself

Worth saying out loud if you stopped at the anime. The manga keeps going long past the war, into the Farmland arc and beyond, where Thorfinn trades the sword for the plow and tries to build instead of destroy. A lot of readers don't know the story they fell for has a whole second life waiting. If you only watched, the source is your easiest next read.

For the myth you felt hovering

6. Heathen, by Natasha Alterici

Vinland Saga keeps the gods offstage. Heathen drags them on. Aydis is a Viking warrior, exiled for loving another woman, who decides the gods themselves are the problem and sets out to defy Odin. It's a Norse comic with cold, gorgeous northern art and a mortal standing against a divine order. If you ever wished Vinland Saga would let Odin actually answer, start here.

7. Northlanders, by Brian Wood

An anthology comic set across the whole Viking Age, each arc a different person in a different year. Brian Wood writes it with modern, blunt language and bleak skies, which makes the brutality land like Vinland Saga's does, dirty and human rather than glorious. The gods stay mostly in people's heads, the way they did for real Vikings, which is its own kind of honesty.

8. Record of Ragnarok, by Shinya Umemura, Takumi Fukui & Ajichika

The opposite of everything subtle in Vinland Saga, and a fun palate cleanser for it. Humanity is sentenced to extinction, so it gets thirteen one-on-one duels: history's greatest mortals against the gods themselves. It's loud and ridiculous and gives you the one thing Vinland Saga never will, the gods swinging back in person. Turn your brain down and enjoy the noise.

If what you really wanted was the gods

Here's the thing about Vinland Saga. It's set in the real Viking Age, so the gods stay where the historical record keeps them, in oaths and prayers and the back of a frightened mind. That restraint is part of why it feels so heavy. But some of you closed it wanting the other half. Not the men who feared the gods. The gods.

Pantheon: The Elemental Artifact is a comic, not a manga, and I'll be straight about that. It's drawn in full color by Willi Roberts and lettered by Lydon White. But it picks up exactly where Vinland Saga's restraint stops. In this world, Ragnarök already happened. The old gods survived by forging unnatural pacts, then locked themselves away. Then a revered goddess is murdered, and the attacks begin. Three young gods from rival houses, Vidar of the Norse, Asha of the Mesopotamian, and Aurora of the Greco-Roman, are the ones who have to face what's coming, even though they have every reason to distrust each other.

It's a signed first edition, 174 full-color pages, collecting issues #1 through #5. 103 readers backed it on Kickstarter and funded it to 147 percent before a single copy was printed, and it carries a cover quote from John Bucher, Executive Director of the Joseph Campbell Foundation. Vinland Saga gave you the men who lived under the gods. This is the book that lets you meet the gods themselves.