Tom Hanks wrote a novel about making a comic book movie

Sam Barsanti
·1 min read
Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks
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No, that’s not SEO word salad in the headline, like one of those spam tweets that says “Joe Biden Dream SMP Blackpink communism FanDuel.” Tom Hanks really wrote a novel about making a superhero movie that’s based on a superhero comic. It’s called The Making Of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, and if all of these meta-shenanigans didn’t tip you off, Hanks told People that “every character in the book” experiences something that he really experienced in his actual moviemaking career. Hanks also said that the characters learn important lessons that he really learned and that there are even “foolish moments” that are like things he really did.

The Making Of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece is sort of a multi-generational epic about American life during and after World War II (would you believe this is a Tom Hanks book?), with one section focusing on a soldier returning home from the war in 1947, another section focusing on his nephew who was inspired to write the soldier into a comic book in the ‘70s, then a third section about a director in the present day who finds the comic book and decides to make it into a movie.

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The novel will also include various comic books written by Hanks and drawn by Robert Sikoryak (a prolific artist who has some experience paying homage to different comic book eras in books like The Unquotable Trump and iTunes Terms And Conditions: The Graphic Novel).

The Making Of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece is Hanks’ second book and first novel. (In 2017, he published the short story collection Uncommon Type.) The new book will be available in May of next year, and you can see an image of the cover—which isn’t super thrilling, to be honest—on Hanks’ Instagram.