TheHounds of God
Swedish Livonia, 1691. An old man stands before the court and tells the judges, plainly, that he is a werewolf.
He says he fights for God.
In the spring of 1691, the district court at Jürgensburg calls an old peasant named Thiess of Kaltenbrunn to answer questions about a church robbery. The judges expect a witness. Thiess gives them a confession.
He is a werewolf, he tells them, and so are other men of the parish. Three nights a year they cross the sea into hell to fight the witches who steal the grain, the livestock and the fish, and to bring the harvest home. They are not the Devil's servants. They are the hounds of God.
The court cannot make him say otherwise. Over five acts the judges, the pastor and the old man argue about what a werewolf is, whose side he is on, and what a village owes to the stories that keep it fed.
“The werewolves are God’s hounds.”Thiess of Kaltenbrunn, trial record, 1691
The case
The book is built on the record of a real trial. In 1691–92, the courts of Swedish Livonia (today's Latvia) heard the testimony of Thiess, then in his eighties, who insisted he had spent his life as a werewolf fighting on God's side against witches.
The judges treated it as superstition and blasphemy; the higher court sentenced him to a flogging and banishment in 1692. The transcript survived in the archives, and historians later made it one of the best-known werewolf cases in Europe.
The graphic novel follows the record closely through the trial, then imagines what the archive leaves out: the years after the sentence, and the land that went on remembering him.
A full historical appendix, with sources, closes the book.
Own the book
A full-color hardcover, printed on demand and shipped to your door.
- FormatHardcover, printed case
- Size7 × 10 in
- Pages120 story pages + appendix
- InteriorFull color
Printed and shipped by Lulu.
Based on a real court case. Script written by AI; storyboards and character designs generated with AI, then heavily reviewed and directed by Aaron Thies to his artistic vision.