Oni Press released an extended preview of Benjamin #1 by Ben H. Winters and Leomacs ahead of the June 2025 release.
In BENJAMIN, novelist and science-fiction icon Benjamin J. Carp was science fiction’s greatest mind. The author of 44 novels and hundreds of short stories — including the counterculture classic The Man They Forgot to Erase — died too young, in the year 1982, following decades of amphetamine abuse and Southern California excess.
And then: Benjamin J. Carp is back, alive in a burned-out motel on the fringes of Los Angeles in the year 2025, some four decades after his death. 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 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 must investigate his greatest mystery yet: himself.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the world is weird right now, weird and sort of scary and sad and exciting,” said Ben H. Winters in a press release from Oni Press. “These are the times that call for Benjamin J. Carp.The eponymous hero of BENJAMIN is brilliant, irascible, slightly ridiculous—and, like so many of us, trying to figure out who he is and what he’s doing here. As in, what he’s doing in this ratty motel room, what he’s doing in Los Angeles, what he’s doing alive and on Earth after kicking the proverbial bucket forty years ago. There is a metafictional aspect to the piece, since I happen to also be a cranky and confused middle-aged writer named Benjamin, but the hero is not me. (Well, except sort of). He is, in a way, all of us, everyone trying to figure out the point of life, and maybe have a fun time along the way. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the world is weird right now, weird and sort of scary and sad and exciting. These are the times that call for Benjamin J. Carp.”
Benjamin #1 arrives on June 18, 2025.
