If you had told us as kids, stay­ing up late watch­ing George Reeves’ Super­man or the Fleis­ch­er car­toons at our Papa and Nana’s house, that we’d one day cre­ate our own Jew­ish super­hero com­ic with Josh Gad and leg­endary artist Ariel Olivet­ti, we would’ve said: ​“Will there be cere­al involved?” 

Because that’s where it all began for us as kids — comics and car­toons over cere­al. And some­where, decades lat­er, in the rem­nants of that mag­i­cal tri­an­gle, our new graph­ic nov­el, The Writer, came about.

But The Writer was­n’t cre­at­ed out of nos­tal­gia. It was born of frus­tra­tion, awe, and a kind of sacred respon­si­bil­i­ty. We noticed a trou­bling pat­tern: Jew­ish com­ic book char­ac­ters were being sub­tly erased when adapt­ed to film and TV. Their her­itage is reduced to vague cul­tur­al cues, if acknowl­edged at all. Mean­while, oth­er faiths and mytholo­gies were embraced in full. Dare­dev­il got to go to con­fes­sion, but our heroes got cod­ed or cut. That did­n’t sit right with us.

So we asked: what if we cre­at­ed a sto­ry that did­n’t just include Jew­ish iden­ti­ty but was steeped in it? Not as dec­o­ra­tion but as the story’s essence. What if we built a mythos around it — around our folk­lore, our mag­ic, our demons, our rit­u­als, our trau­ma, and our humor?

We pitched the idea to Josh Gad, a cre­ative force we’ve long admired. To our delight, Josh lit up. This was­n’t just a project to him — it was per­son­al. His grand­par­ents were Holo­caust sur­vivors. He’s out­spo­ken in his advo­ca­cy for the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty and brings with him a stag­ger­ing knowl­edge of Jew­ish his­to­ry, mys­ti­cism, along with a deep knowl­edge of nar­ra­tive struc­ture. More impor­tant­ly, he’s hilarious.

Togeth­er, we start­ed build­ing The Writer. Josh described our hero, Stan Siegel, as ​“not cut from the same cloth as Peter Park­er or Bruce Wayne.” He’s schlumpy, self-dep­re­cat­ing, and deeply human. And yet, when push comes to shove, he ris­es to the Her­culean chal­lenges before him. In his case, by lit­er­al­ly eat­ing pieces of paper with pow­ers writ­ten on them. (We’re not say­ing one of us may have eat­en the paper of a minia­ture Torah as a kid to see if it worked, but…)

Our research for the com­ic turned into a full-blown obses­sion. We fell in love with Judaism all over again. We dis­cov­ered mag­ic bowls used in antiq­ui­ty to trap demons. Incan­ta­tion texts. The Sword of Moses. The Ring of Solomon. Golems. Shed­im. Mys­ti­cal tra­di­tions that were shock­ing­ly under­ex­plored in pop cul­ture but felt as rich as any­thing found in Greek or Norse mythol­o­gy. If we’d learned about this stuff as kids, one of us might’ve become a rab­bi. We became storytellers.

We weren’t aim­ing to make a Jew­ish com­ic per se. We want­ed to make an awe­some, emo­tion­al­ly dri­ven, pulse-pound­ing com­ic that hap­pens to be intrin­si­cal­ly Jew­ish. The kind of com­ic that feels like Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Ghost­busters, but with Teki­ah Gedolah blasts and ancient Hebrew incan­ta­tions rever­ber­at­ing through the pages. We want­ed read­ers to be enter­tained, to laugh, to cry, and to maybe learn some­thing, just like we did through our eye-open­ing research.

Josh brought struc­ture and soul to the project. We brought decades of pent-up ideas and lore. But none of it would have mat­tered with­out our illus­tra­tor, Ariel Olivet­ti. When Ben slid into Ariel’s DMs, we didn’t expect a response, let along a part­ner­ship with a titan. Ariel under­stood the tone we had in mind imme­di­ate­ly. His robust and yet ground­ed art style made this sto­ry feel epic in scale and gave it a momen­tous, bib­li­cal feel. But it was inti­mate in show­ing emo­tion­al depth. Every trans­for­ma­tion, every crea­ture, every tear — he nailed it.

And then there was our let­ter­er, Frank Cvetkovic, who gave rhythm to the chaos. Let­ter­ing is the qui­et heart­beat of comics, and Frank’s work made every pan­el sing.

Some­where along the way, The Writer stopped being a project and became a mis­sion. One way to com­bat the ris­ing tide of anti­semitism is not by shout­ing back, but by show­ing up with sto­ries that are nuanced, human, and proud­ly Jew­ish. We believe that some­times the only way for­ward is through a sto­ry; sto­ries pre­serve mem­o­ry, spark curios­i­ty, and bridge generations.

We’ve heard The Writer called the Jew­ish answer to Per­cy Jack­son, and that’s a mas­sive com­pli­ment. But for us, it’s also a trib­ute — to our grand­par­ents who sur­vived, to the com­ic cre­ators who were nev­er cred­it­ed, to the kids still look­ing for heroes who reflect their his­to­ry, and to the idea that even a neb­bishy writer can change the world.

When you read The Writer, we hope you feel the same spark we did when we first dis­cov­ered that Jew­ish mag­ic exist­ed — not just in the sto­ries of the past, but in us today.