Beginning in June, Frozen and The Angry Birds Movie star Josh Gad will release his first comic book, Dark Horse Comics‘s The Writer, which teams Gad with storytellers Ben and Max Berkowitz (The Forever House), veteran Marvel artist Ariel Olivetti, and letterer Frank Cvetkovic (Count Crowley). The Writer combines the fantastical elements of cultural folklore with the real-life challenges of the creative process, and the Final Order Cutoff date for the series is today. If you’re interested in getting copies of The Writer in your subscription box, now’s the time to reach out to your local comics retailer.
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You can check out a trailer for The Writer, voiced by Gad, here. Gad and the Berkowitz brothers sat down with ComicBook to tease a little about the project, which brings the Jewish faith and Old Testament mysticism and mythology very much front and center.
“What’s interesting is at the core of the story is a guy, Stan, who in many ways struggles with his own faith and identity, dealing with people who very much want to vanquish him based on that same faith,” Gad told ComicBook. “The story involves Nazis, and in a way that was always meant to be an homage to kind of one of the big things that inspired us, which was Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the use of Old Testament mythology to sort of build out something that feels fresh, and new, and steeped in its own sort of mysticism, a unique mysticism that doesn’t often get portrayed in the comic book world, or for that matter, in the television and film world.”
In The Writer, Stan Siegel is an established storyteller known for comic book stories of the heroic and fantastical. However, his life takes an unexpected and dark turn when he is plunged into a Nazi occult-fueled nightmare. In a whirlwind of folklore and magic, Stan’s hunger for answers unveils hidden identities amid demonic chaos and high-speed chases. This thrilling saga is a race against time, with Stan compelled to stop the rising tide of terror by becoming the hero from his pages.
“There’s a meta text [in The Writer] of following a writer dealing with their own anxiety as they explore this journey, trying to build a story themselves,” Ben Berkowitz explained. “So it’s like, ‘How much can they do? How much can they save?’ So there’s that kind of element to this story. The idea is to build this greater universe that we’ll hopefully be able to tap into.”
That universe would include untold wonders and horrors from Jewish folklore, and a superhero-ish character — drawn to resemble Gad — who can take on the ability of those creatures and characters by writing down a super power and then swallowing the word.
“In Judaism, Hebrew and words in general are incredibly important. They have the ability to change and create,” Berkowitz said. “I’m actually getting a tattoo of the Sword of Moses, which is a mystical book that can access this weapon, but it’s built on the power of words, and that’s kind of the emphasis of our story, but then there’s also the backstory. The way-backstory, where I was a kid and I actually ate a mini Torah when I was, I don’t know, I must’ve been like six.”
“You’re not supposed to drop them, let alone eat them!” Gad interjected.
“But that was also the inspiration for our character Stan, where he actually has to physically write down the superpower, swallow it, and then he temporarily gains that power,” Berkowitz said. “So it was inspired by that and then the story of the Golem, where a rabbi would also insert the power, the word of life into the mouth, to bring it to life.”
Of Stan’s mother who steps in to guide him in the story, Max Berkowitz added, “And we also wanted to put our mom into this, and see how she would interact with a character like Josh. When she met Josh, she was like, ‘He’s very handsome!’”
The first issue of The Writer hits comic shops and digital retailers on June 19.
