DRAWING STRENGTH TOGETHER

WHEN HE SAW HIS TEEN DAUGHTER STRUGGLING, COMIC BOOK AUTHOR ETHAN SACKS CREATED A HERO TO GIVE HER HOPE. THEN THEY JOINED FORCES TO FINISH THE STORY

- EILEEN FINAN

Ethan Sacks was sitting in the cafeteria at New

York City’s Bellevue Hospital in March 2019, overwhelmed with guilt and fear. His 15-year-old daughter Naomi was upstairs in the children’s psychiatric ward, hospitalized for major depression and suicidal ideation, and he was spiraling into self-blame. “Maybe if I had been a better parent, I would’ve caught this earlier and helped her,” Sacks remembers thinking. He and his wife, Masako, a bank manager, “were completely unmoored,” he says. “We thought, ‘Where do we go from here?’”

As he waited for visiting hours to see his daughter, the comic book writer and former Daily News journalist pulled out an old reporter’s notebook and stared at the blank page. “I wanted to come up with a story that would inspire Naomi to want to live,” says Ethan, 51. He scrawled a single sentence in his notebook: “A girl who doesn’t know if she wants to live is the only one who can save all life on Earth.”

Over the next few years that nascent idea became a fully realized labor of love for both Ethan and Naomi, now 20. The result, A Haunted Girl, a comic