Kristin Kreuk Co-writing Gothic Horror Comic

Or is it folk horror? Titan Comics refers to Black Star both ways. To be honest, though I am a big horror fan and a big horror comics fan, I’m hard pressed to define folk horror except I may know it when I see it. Putting that aside, the interesting thing about Black Star is who has co-created it. Smallville’s Lana Lang, Kristin Kreuk, has turned her talents to comics storytelling. From reading the description and looking at the art, she’s raised my interest by not overtly including a character she could play in the movie.

Not that that gets in the way of enjoying The Guy in the Chair, for example, but it’s a thing.

Kreuk collaborates with two other writers in a horror tale that seems to follow familiar footsteps. Hapless guy with mysterious talents finds himself stuck between two warring factions of supernatural creatures. But what looks to separate Black Star from others is its setting — 19th Century Winnipeg during the height of the fur trade. Black Star could very well teach us a little history and culture, too.

Titan Comics releases Black Star #1 just after San Diego Comic-Con International this year, which means a couple of things for me. An exclusive #1 will probably be at Titan Comics’ booth, so I can read it a little early. And at least one of the writers will be at Comic-Con so I hope I’ll get to sit down with someone involved. Or the artist, Joe Bocardo, because these pages Titan released look beautiful.

From Titan Comics:

Globally renowned publisher Titan Comics are thrilled to be publishing Black Star (in stores and digital devices July 29, 2026) a debut comic series by acclaimed actress Kristin Kreuk (Smallville, Reacher, Murder in a Small Town). Co-written with Peter Mooney (Rookie Blue, Mistletoe Murders) and screenwriter Eric Putzer, and illustrated by artist Joe Bocardo (Nightwalkers, The Hexiles), this five-issue series is a Northern Gothic noir steeped in horror and dark humour.

Amidst skirmishes between two warring factions in the early nineteenth-century fur trade, Dashiell Carlyle discovers he has magical abilities… and that he’s not alone. Thrust into a secret order with designs to use their magic to build a new and better world, Dashiell discovers that their utopia may come at a horrific cost.

It’s a violent world: gritty, bloody, and dark. But that’s balanced with a sense of discovery and awe. The storytelling’s propulsive, and the morality grey. It’s The Revenant meets Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. It’s a love letter to a frozen corner of the world that few know. It’s weird. And wonderful. And something wholly its own.

“Black Star was born while Peter, Eric, and I were filming “Burden of Truth” in Winnipeg.” said Kristin Kreuk. “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,” said co-writer Peter Mooney. “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,” said co-writer Eric Putzer. “In a story about power and human nature, we felt that intimacy necessary to make the reader an active part of the exchange.” –

“For a comic book artist, working on a series as ambitious and well-written as Black Star is a gift,” said artist Joe Bocardo. “But if you also work on it with a talented and friendly team that gives you creative freedom, then it’s not a gift; it’s a privilege.”

“Set in the eerie, snow-blanketed wasteland of early 19th Century Winnipeg, this is magic as you’ve never seen it before,” said Titan Comics editor, Jake Devine. “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 mesmerising artwork as it envelops them in a story filled with awe and tragedy.”

Titan’s Black Star comics is set to launch with Issue #1 in stores and on digital devices July 29, 2026.

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