When celebrities do graphic novels, it is usually a way to extend their brand. Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready does a graphic novel about the early grunge scene in Seattle. Keanu Reeves does a graphic novel about an unstoppable warrior on a killing spree. Great British Bakeoff finalist Kim Joy does a graphic novel involving baking, and so on.
But actor John Cusack didn’t seem to get the memo, unless his brand is some previously unsuspected combination of Don Delillo, Hunter S. Thompson and Mark Leyner (who wrote the foreword), filtered through mid 90s-era Grant Morrison. His new graphic novel Momo (Mad Cave Studios, due out September 29, 2026), beautifully illustrated by Argentine artist Ignacio Noé, would be ambitious even if attempted by a longtime practitioner of the form. For a debut, from someone new to the medium, it is truly out of left field.
“It’s not ‘on brand,’” said Cusack in an interview ahead of his Comic-Con panel to launch the book on Friday, July 26. “It’s more like a brand-buster.”
Momo in its simplest conception is an amalgam of a buddy story, heist and road trip with a sci-fi twist, set in 1972 and embodying the storytelling style and aesthetics of an indie film from that era. The two protagonists, “Johnson” and “Tina Louise” (aka “Ani Mal”) for their own reasons, team up with a seedy, drug-fueled character named Doc, to fulfill a destiny regarding the head of a captured alien in the custody of Richard Nixon’s government. This alien head is the singular obsession of Jackie Gleason (the actor from The Honeymooners, quite a celebrity in the early 70s) and 1920s-era French silent film star Antonin Artaud, whom Gleason had rescued from an insane asylum following World War II.
“It is based on a true story,” Cusack assured me. “It’s all in recently declassified files that I managed to obtain.”
That relatively straightforward plot is complicated by some very opaque characterization typical of Cusack’s postmodern influences, a fanciful blend of history and conspiracy theories, and a ton of Preston Sturges-style snappy dialogue that consumes pages of talking-head exposition scenes. Some of these creative decisions and digressions would sandbag the story if not for Noé’s engaging, painterly art style and facility with European-style comics pacing. Probably Momo’s closest analogue in both art and story for contemporary comics readers is James Tynion IV and Martin Simmons’ Department of Truth (Image Comics), which is a fairly high bar.
So what motivated Cusack to take this direction for his inaugural foray into the medium? “Back when I was starting to make movies, you would find people who had aspirations to do something totally unique, not just installments in a franchise or something that fit their business strategy.”
While that’s not how things work in 2020s Hollywood, Cusack says it occurred to him that with comics, he could just write whatever he wanted, hire an artist, and see it presented visually. Mad Cave Studios, an up and coming independent comics publisher, took on the project to publish as a graphic novel. He launched it at Comic-Con at a panel moderated by actor and comic creator David Dastmalchian.
Cusack was cagy about expressing future media ambitions for the story, though he acknowledged writing it with a cinematic sense of story, pacing and structure, inspired by low-budget crime movies from the early 70s era in which the story is set.
Whatever the commercial future of the project, Cusack says he enjoyed the collaborative process with the artist and the freedom that the comics media afforded him. “I wanted to do something like movies from a different era, and no matter what happens, if someone reads it and likes it, I count that as a success.”
He says he is already working on a second graphic novel project with Noé and hopes to continue exploring the medium as his career in acting and filmmaking allows.
