Black Star: Preview the Gothic Horror Series From Smallville’s Kristin Kreuk


Smallville’s Kristin Kreuk is not only the star of one of the most successful comic book TV shows of all time, but she’s now making the jump to writing comics with a new gothic horror series called Black Star.

IGN can exclusively debut the first preview of Titan Comics’ Black Star. Get a closer look in the slideshow gallery below:

Black Star is a five-issue series co-written by Kreuk, Peter Mooney (Rookie Blue), and screenwriter Eric Putzer, and illustrated by Joe Bocardo (Nightwalkers). Here’s the official logline 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.

Art by Joe Bocardo. (Image Credit: Titan Comics)
Art by Joe Bocardo. (Image Credit: Titan Comics)

“Black Star was born while Peter, Eric, and I were filming ‘Burden of Truth’ in Winnipeg,” said Kreuk in press release. “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 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,” added 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.”

Black Star #1 will be released on July 29, 2026. You can preorder a copy at Forbidden Planet or at your local comic shop.

In other comic book news, find out which series was selected as IGN’s best comic book of 2025, and see which comics we’re most excited for in 2026.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.


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