Thorgal – precision, restraint and choice.

The trade was small, insignificant in the grand scheme of things. A childhood barter, some scrap of possession given away for something else, though the details are long since swallowed by the tides of memory. I don’t remember what I lost. Nevertheless, I remembered what I had gained – Thorgal, the first of many. This battered, ‘read to the limit’ barely holding together comic book, which god knows how many hands had passed through before I got it, became a gateway to a world that had followed me through the years as if it were a shadow streaking beneath the weight of a setting sun.

It didn’t start with archery. Not really. Back then, the bow was no more than a tool in the hands of a man who fascinated me—not a weapon of war, not a sport, just something Thorgal used with quiet precision, as natural to him as breathing. I wasn’t one for swords and battle cries. There was something in his silence that spoke louder than all the bluster of other heroes, something in the way he held himself, in the way he avoided violence when he could and struck only when he must. He was no king, no conqueror, no warrior hungry for blood. He was just a man, caught between fate and freedom, a wanderer who asked for nothing but the right to live in peace.

I devoured those stories, begged my parents for each new volume that came out, built my own little kingdom of paper and ink, where I roamed beside Thorgal through frozen wastes and forgotten lands. Naturally my mother had her own opinion on the subject – to be blunt, she did not approve of my fascination with comics. As a Polish language and literature teacher, she saw comics as something I would call lowbrow art, if she was at all inclined to call comics any kind of art. We often argued about it, sometimes it was a passionate and emotional dispute in the background. For me, in my adolescence, comics was and to some extent still is yet another form of expression, of the aryanism dormant in the creator – another does not mean inferior or worse simply different…. A good comic book requires no less craftsmanship, research and imagination than a dicent novel itself – hence we often call it a 2graphic novel”. Still, no matter how well I argued – my mother remained unwavering in her convictions, like an old oak tree against the gusty blasts of a malignant wind. My dad, on the other hand, did the opposite. Yes… He rarely spoke, but from time to time I would catch him flicking through my comics when he thought no one was looking, sometimes pausing for longer, sometimes only for a few moments, but his eyebrows would often raise in an expression of surprise or concentration, and a curious half-smile would often appear on his lips. He saw something there, I think. Maybe not what I saw, but enough to know there was something worth reading.

At the time, archery was a thing on the sidelines. I shot a bow now and then with the scouts, drew back the string and let the arrow fly with no great thought, no deeper understanding beyond the thrill of hitting a target. It was a game, nothing more. Thorgal’s bow, sleek and deadly in his hands, was just another part of his legend, something that set him apart from the iron-clad warriors who swung swords in blind fury. I liked it, but it wasn’t yet mine.

It was Łucznicy—Les Archers in the original—that made me pause. That was the first time I truly saw the bow for what it was. Thorgal, forced into an archery tournament to win back his freedom, standing against Kriss de Valnor, whose hands were just as steady but whose heart was crueler. She was wild where he was measured, ruthless where he was restrained. Their arrows cut the air like whispers of fate, each shot carrying something more than just skill—willpower, defiance, survival. There was no brute strength in it, no reckless violence. The bow was a weapon for those who understood patience, precision, the stillness before the storm.

Thorgal’s archery was never a show of dominance. He didn’t shoot to prove himself. He shot because he had to, because the world did not give him the luxury of peace. He was a man of contradictions—born of the stars, raised by warriors, a fighter who despised fighting, an exile who carried his home within him. He wanted nothing but to live quietly, and yet the world would not leave him be. It made me wonder, even then, if true skill with the bow was not just about how well one could shoot, but about knowing when not to.

Jean Van Hamme, the architect of Thorgal’s journey, understood that. His stories were never about glory—they were about survival, about the weight of choice, about the price of walking one’s own path. And Grzegorz Rosiński, whose brush brought it all to life, captured archery in a way few artists ever could. The bowstrings in Thorgal hummed with tension you could almost feel, the arrows were not just lines on a page but extensions of a moment, a decision made and released into the air. And though neither of them were archers themselves, they understood the soul of the craft in a way that only true storytellers can.

It’s strange how stories plant seeds in us that don’t bloom until much later. For years, the bow remained just an image in my mind, something tied to Thorgal, to the pages of my youth. I didn’t realise this until much later, when I held a real bow in my hands, feeling the weight of the wood and the string yielding to my fingers. The repetitive process of stretching, of holding still, of feeling the balance between tension and relaxation – there was something familiar in it, like a memory of doing things I had never really experienced.

Archery is not a sport of force. It is not about domination. It is about control, about knowing yourself well enough to steady your breath, about understanding that every shot carries a part of you with it. It is the weight of the moment before release, the acceptance that once the arrow flies, there is no calling it back. It is possible that it was for this reason Thorgal, when wielding his bow, did not regard it solely as a weapon of war, but above all as an important link to something more profound. A mark that even in a world plunged into violence, there was still room for precision, restraint and choice.

I never thought, back when I was just a boy trading away forgettable trinkets for a dog-eared comic book, that I would one day stand on a range, bow in hand, feeling that same quiet focus that I had once only read about. But that’s the thing about stories. They don’t just entertain us—they shape us, linger in the back of our minds, waiting for the right moment to take root.

The bow, once just an extension of Thorgal’s hand, became an extension of mine. And though my shots will never carry the same weight as his, though I will never stand in a tournament to win back my freedom, I still feel that moment of quiet, that breath before the string snaps forward, the arrow flying straight and true. And in that instant, I am no longer just a reader flipping through pages of an old comic. I am something more.