Oni Press has released a sneak peek at Benjamin #1 from writer Ben Winters in his comic book debut and illustrator Leomacs.
In the tradition of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice comes a uniquely fascinating and hilariously deranged excursion into the metatextual nexus where existence and oblivion, past and future, genius and madness, and glitter and grim reality all meet just beyond Hollywood Boulevard in the first of three prestige-format, ad-free issues unlike anything you’ve ever experienced . . . in this timeline anyway . . .
More than just a writer, more than just a science-fiction icon, Benjamin J. Carp was a cultural revolutionary. Across 44 novels and hundreds of short stories—including the counterculture classic The Man They Couldn’t Erase—Carp pushed the boundaries of literary respectability for the sci-fi genre and his readers’ perception of reality itself . . . until decades of amphetamine abuse and Southern California excess finally ended a mind-bending career that always just escaped mainstream success. He died in 1982.
Until 2025 . . . when Benjamin J. Carp awakens, alive, in a burned-out motel on the fringes of Los Angeles. He remembers dying. He knows he shouldn’t exist. Is he a dream? A robot? A ghost? A clone? A simulation? In his own time, Carp pondered all of these scenarios intensely through his fiction—and, now, as he treks from Studio City to Venice Beach and onward into the paranoid sprawl of 21st-century Los Angeles, he will be called to investigate his greatest mystery yet: himself.
“In this sequence from early in the first issue of BENJAMIN, our cranky, hyperarticulate, cult sci-fi author hero Benjamin J. Carp has just been kicked out of the motel room where he woke up,” said Ben H. Winters. “The motel manager (quite reasonably) thinks he’s some sort of drunk or squatter, but Carp has no memories at all of how he got there, or anywhere, since he died back in 1982. Out on the street he is astonished at the strange new world (which he thinks has ripped him off) and is rescued by this sweet earnest young man named Marcus, who works at the motel.”
Benjamin #1 (of 3) arrives on June 18, 2025.
