Takeshi Kovacs Graphic Novels Books in Order

The Takeshi Kovacs graphic novels return to the same stack and sleeve future as the original trilogy, but tell new stories in a visual medium. They are set at different points in Kovacs’s long, violent career and give you more time with him in shorter, punchier cases.

In Altered Carbon: Download Blues he is trying to live a quieter life in a backwater part of the Protectorate, working low level security and hoping trouble will not notice him. Naturally, it does. A supposedly simple job dealing with stolen data pulls him into a mess of corrupt officials, artificial intelligences and people treating human bodies as disposable hardware.

Altered Carbon: One Life, One Death starts with Kovacs at rock bottom, locked in a brutal prison and sleeved into a body that is failing under the strain. When he learns that fellow Envoys from a half remembered battle have been stolen and sold to one of the richest people in known space, he breaks out and goes hunting. The chase takes him across worlds, through high society parties and war zones, as he tries to find out what really happened in the gaps in his own memory.

Both books lean into fast action, big set pieces and the sort of violent, sardonic inner monologue that defines Kovacs on the page.

They work fine as standalones if all you know is the core idea of stacks and sleeves, but readers who have spent time with the novels will recognise old scars, familiar names and side comments that hint at where each adventure fits in his timeline. For fans of the show, they also offer an alternate look at the character created by the original author rather than an adaptation of existing material.