The Strain Graphic Novels Books in Order

The Strain graphic novels take the vampire epidemic from Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s trilogy and translate it into a visual language that feels right at home in comics. Instead of long passages of description, readers get panels full of shadows, worm filled corpses, and the brutal elegance of the strigoi.

The first hardcover volume, often labeled Book One, adapts the events of The Strain. It follows Dr. Ephraim Goodweather onto the dead airplane at JFK, introduces Abraham Setrakian and his mysterious cane, and shows New York tipping from health scare into full blown catastrophe. Artist driven pages swing from tight, claustrophobic rooms to big cityscapes streaked with contamination.

Subsequent volumes move through The Fall and the later stages of the war, as the human resistance scrambles to understand the Master’s plan and the meaning of the ancient Occido Lumen. The comics can compress or expand time in ways that prose cannot, spending a whole page on a single grotesque transformation or cutting quickly between battles in different boroughs.

One of the pleasures of this format is seeing how designs evolve between del Toro’s notebooks, the novels, and the television adaptation. The graphic novels sit somewhere in the middle, borrowing the cinematic sense of framing but leaning into the exaggeration that ink on paper allows. Bloodworms wriggle larger, vampire mouths unhinge wider, and the plague’s spread across the city can be shown almost like a map.

Story wise, the comics stay close to the spine of the books, but they inevitably make different choices about what to show. Inner monologues get pared back, minor characters may be trimmed or combined, and certain set pieces are staged for maximum visual impact. That makes them a good option for readers who want the gist of the trilogy in a more distilled, image driven form.

This series background is here to help you situate those volumes alongside the prose and the FX television show. If you like graphic horror with a strong monster mythology, the Strain comics offer a clear entry point into del Toro and Hogan’s world without needing to read every novel first.