At the sur­face lev­el, The Writer fol­lows Stan Siegel, a Jew­ish pro­fes­sor who spe­cial­izes in the inter­sec­tions between super­hero comics and Jew­ish folk­lore. Stan’s mun­dane life, along­side his tumul­tuous rela­tion­ship to his daugh­ter and ex-wife, are inter­rupt­ed by mag­ic paper and the real­iza­tion that his father’s dis­ap­pear­ance was the result of anti­se­mit­ic demons, neo-Nazis, and com­plex lega­cies of super­pow­ers. As the nar­ra­tive con­tin­ues, it reveals a more nuanced set of ideals and even the capac­i­ty to par­o­dy the indus­try of mod­ern Jew­ish-themed fan­ta­sy and its mar­ket­ing. Stan is more of a fish out of water when he tries to relate to his fam­i­ly then he is when becom­ing a super­hero who fights demons and Nazis.One of the pri­ma­ry rea­sons for this is that the sto­ry world has much more appeal to him as some­one who finds com­fort in under­stand­ing his Jew­ish iden­ti­ty through comics and shared stories. 

While the work does end ambigu­ous­ly, mak­ing fun of itself in the process, the visu­al ele­ments of the sto­ry are unpar­al­leled. The cov­er art by vet­er­an com­ic artist Mike Migno­lia of Hell­boy fame, along­side the pan­el­ing and art­work of Ariel Olivet­ti, makes even the sur­re­al­ist scenes vibrant and engag­ing. Ques­tions (such as ​“Does every Jew­ish Fan­ta­sy have to include a Golem?” and ​“Are sto­ries even still cru­cial in this age of real life hate and racial injus­tice?”) appear in box text frag­ments lit­tered through­out the work in a styl­is­ti­cal­ly meta wink to the read­er at the joke at play about comics, Jew­ish­ness, and sto­ry­telling beats. Folk­loric scenes are col­ored in beiges and beau­ti­ful black and white. The facial details and var­ied body types of the char­ac­ters make each design dis­tinct and allow the read­er to not become lost in the large cast of char­ac­ters as they under­go the strange, the sur­re­al, and the very meta­tex­tu­al world of The Writer​’s motifs and themes.