Actor Kristin Kreuk, who rose to fame as Lana Lang in Smallville, is making her comics writing debut with the gothic noir story, Black Star. Kreuk is co-writing the book with Peter Mooney (Rookie Blue) and screenwriter Eric Putzer (Burden of Truth), featuring art by Joe Bocardo. The five-issue series from Titan Comics will debut in July 2026.

Black Star is set in the early 19th century with two groups warring over the fur trade, and a man named Dashiell Carlyle discovering that he has magical abilities. He then learns about a secret order that wants to use magic to shape the world, but their vision of the future could mean something horrible for others.

Kreuk portrayed Lana in much of Smallville’s ten-season run that began in 2001. She followed that up by starring in the Beauty and the Beast TV show, and more recently starred in Burden of Truth and Murder in a Small Town. She is also a producer through Parvati Creative Inc., which she co-founded, and is now adding comic writer to her résumé with Black Star.

“Black Star was born while Peter, Eric, and I were filming Burden of Truth in Winnipeg,” Kreuk said. “We were inspired by the city’s lore and, because we worked so well together, began spending our spare time on set (and then, for years afterwards) developing our own take on the history and magic we imagined pulsing beneath its surface, shaping the rhythms of the city and the battles raging just beyond our view.”

“Sometimes people come to my hometown and they can’t see past its rough edges or inhospitable weather. But it was clear Kristin and Eric could see right into the strangeness that makes Winnipeg so unique,” Mooney said. “This isn’t so much an alternative history, but an omitted chapter that’s been lost to time. It’s bizarre and fantastical and entirely imagined – but it goes a long way towards explaining why the city is how it is today.”

“There’s an intimacy to comics that no other form quite achieves; the reader controls the rhythm, the breath, the revelation,” Putzer said. “In a story about power and human nature, we felt that intimacy necessary to make the reader an active part of the exchange.”

“Set in the eerie, snow-blanketed wasteland of early 19th century Winnipeg, this is magic as you’ve never seen it before,” Titan Comics editor Jake Devine said. “Hopeful yet bleak, miraculous yet insidious, and only time will tell if the prize is worth the cost. Readers are going to be swept away by Joe Bocardo’s mesmerizing artwork as it envelops them in a story filled with awe and tragedy.”

Black Star #1 arrives in comic shops on July 29.