Get ready for a comic book debut which is 25 years in the making. Globally renowned publisher Titan Comics has announced that Smallville star Kristen Kruek, along with co-writers Peter Mooney (Rookie Blue, Mistletoe Murders) and screenwriter Eric Putzer, are masterminding a new five-issue miniseries, Black Star.
The first issue of Black Star, which also features artwork by Joe Bocardo (Nightwalkers, The Hexiles), will arrive in comic book stores on July 29, 2026.
Alongside new preview artwork Titan has also released a tantalising synopsis for the series:
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. Look out for more information very soon!
