Kristin Kreuk Officially Unveils First Look At Debut Comic Book

Kristin Kreuk made her breakthrough in the role of young Clark Kent's love interest, Lana Lang, in the hit Superman prequel series, Smallville. Years later, the actor is making her return to comic book fiction, but in a manner that may come as a surprise to many.

Kristin Kreuk makes her comic book author debut as the co-creator of Black Star, a five-issue series from Titan Comics that combines history, humor, and horror, according to the official logline.

"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," the summary reads.

The synopsis then adds, "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 also marks the comic book debut for Kreuk's co-writers, Peter Mooney & Eric Putzer. Providing the artwork is Joe Bacardo, known for The Hexiles and Scout Comics' freaky Phantasmagoria, who also designed one of the four alternate covers for the dark period fantasy story's first issue that Titan Comics recently unveiled.

Black Star Is A Personal Project For Its Creators

All that anybody who is surprised or confused by Kristin Kreuk's choice for her first plunge into comic book writing needs to know to understand her motivation is that Black Star is set in Winnipeg, Canada. The town is actually where the actor, also a native Canadian, met her co-writers before it served as their inspiration for the story.

"Black Star was born while Peter, Eric, and I were filming Burden of Truth in Winnipeg," a quote from Kreuk in Titan's press release states. "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."

Burden of Truth is a legal drama that aired in the United States on Smallville's original network, The CW, from 2018 to 2021. The series, by creator Brad Simpson, starred Kreuk as an attorney who returns to her rural hometown to work on a case, which leads her to reconnect with an old friend who also happens to be the prosecutor, played by Peter Mooney.

Mooney, who is also a Winnipeg native, adds to why creating Black Star with Kreuk and Eric Putzer was so important to him.

"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 says. "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."

Putzer, who became acquainted with Kreuk and Mooney while serving on the writing staff for Burden of Truth, speaks about why the comic book medium was the right choice for Black Star. He says, "There’s an intimacy to comics that no other form quite achieves; the reader controls the rhythm, the breath, the revelation. In a story about power and human nature, we felt that intimacy was necessary to make the reader an active part of the exchange."

More recently, Kreuk starred on Murder in the Small Town, a short-lived Fox original drama based on a series of novels by L. R. Wright. She had previously returned to The CW three years after leaving Smallville in 2009 by co-leading a modernized, crime-thriller approach to a classic fairy tale called Beauty and the Beast.

Black Star #1 releases in stores and on digital devices on July 29.