Comic Books

EXCLUSIVE Oni Preview: Benjamin #1 – Out June 18th

Until 2025 . . . when Benjamin J. Carp awakens, alive, in a burned-out motel on the fringes of Los Angeles. He remembers dying…

David Brooke

April 24, 2025

Courtesy of Oni Press, AIPT can share a preview of Benjamin, a prestige format three-issue series by Ben H. Winters and Leomacs out on June 18th. We spoke to Winters all about this new comics miniseries that’s in the tradition of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice and it’s a uniquely fascinating and hilariously deranged excursion.

So what’s Benjamin about?

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.

Read the preview below!

PORTLAND, OR (April 24, 2025) – Oni Press – the multiple Eisner and Harvey Award-winning publisher of groundbreaking comics and graphic novels since 1997 – is proud to unveil the first look inside BENJAMIN #1, the full-length comic debut of writer Ben Winters (EC’s Cruel Universe, Underground Airlines), creator of CBS’ acclaimed TV series Tracker and author of the Edgar Award-winning and Philip K. Dick Award-winning The Last Policeman novel trilogy with artwork by acclaimed illustrator Leomacs (EC’s Epitaphs from the Abyss, DC Black Label’s Rogues)!

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.”

Published across three extra-long, ad-free chapters featuring enhanced design elements and deluxe, cardstock covers, . BENJAMIN #1 will feature psychotropic cover art by Christian Ward (Invisible Kingdom), Leomacs (Rougues), and Malachi Ward (Black Hammer: The Return).

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