EXTENDED PREVIEW: BENJAMIN #1 by Philip K. Dick Award Winner Ben H. Winters & Acclaimed Artist Leomacs

Do Not Operate Heavy Machinery After Reading This Extended, 10-Page Preview and Downloading the Trailer

Beyond Death. Beyond Life. Beyond L.A.

An Extraordinary, Mind-Enhancing Comic Experience,

Told in Three Extra-Length Prestige Format Issues,

With Covers by Superstar Artist Christian Ward

Oni Press, the multiple Eisner and Harvey Award-winning publisher of groundbreaking comics and graphic novels is primed to publish BENJAMIN, an ambitious, senses-shattering, science-fiction epic by Edgar Award nominee and Philip K. Dick Award winner Ben H. Winters (EC’s Cruel Universe, The Last Policeman Trilogy) and rising star Leomacs (EC’s Epitaphs from the Abyss, Basketful of Heads). Now, timed to FOC and ahead of the highly anticipated publication of BENJAMIN #1 on June 18, Oni Press is unleashing a reality-altering 10-page preview and trailer.

"BENJAMIN is the rare kind of story that does the seemingly impossible: define an entirely new genre for the comic medium, while also feeling so artfully constructed and well told that it feels like it has actually existed for decades," said Oni Press President & Publisher Hunter Gorinson. "And the dueling contradictions of BENJAMIN don't end there. This extraordinary story of a science fiction writer's unexpected resurrection is warm, funny, and very much down to Earth on one hand, while, on the other, it's also a mind-expanding, galaxy-spanning karma trip that questions the very nature of existence itself. Ben H. Winters and Leomacs have conjured something spectacular with BENJAMIN – and, regardless of it (or Benjamin J. Carp's) true nature, rest assured: you're unlikely to encounter a story of this caliber and psychic calibration anywhere else, at this in this dimension."

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.

Ben H. Winters is the Edgar Award and Philip K. Dick Award-winning novelist of The Last Policeman trilogy and Underground Airlines, as well as the creator of CBS’s #1-rated hit television series Tracker and a former writer for FX’s acclaimed Marvel science-fiction series Legion. BENJAMIN #1 will mark Winters’s full-length comics debut, fresh off his appearance as one of the principal writers behind Oni’s best-selling resurgence of the acclaimed EC Comics line, where he has been featured regularly in the pages of Eisner-nominated Cruel Universe, Shiver SuspenStories, and Cruel Kingdom.

“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. “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.”

Here’s what people are saying about BENJAMIN:

“BENJAMIN is cosmically brilliant. You have never been on a trip like this.” — Lev Grossman (The Magicians, The Bright Sword)

“STOP! Put down your Psy-Tac Intercommulator and listen! BENJAMIN, the new Oni Press series from stalwart writer Ben H. Winters and artist Leomacs plumbs the cosmic depths to explore the mysteries of time, space, and fiction! Taking a hint from the mad later scribblings of Philip K. Dick, BENJAMIN posits: what if Dick woke up in a hotel room 43 years after his death? The answer? It involves stealing a dog and going through a dead father's collection of sci-fi first editions! Now pick up your Psy-Tac Intercommulator, and call your LCS to pre-order the mind-bendy travails of a man lost in time...a man called BENJAMIN!" — Christopher Condon (Ultimate Wolverine, That Texas Blood)

“A uniquely fascinating and hilariously deranged excursion.”—AIPT Comics

“If you—like me—grew up with and/or still read the works of countercultural writers who poked and prodded at the big “what ifs” of existence or if you find yourself wondering how we know what we know while occasionally dissociating, BENJAMIN will most likely be your jam. Ben H. Winters’ words and Leomacs’ art look to be creating a perfect mix of the surreal and the grounded, the mundane and the urgent. Life is unsettlingly fantastic and inscrutable and Benjamin looks to understand that and embrace it unflinchingly.”—FREAK SUGAR

Presented in a prestige, ad-free format with 30 pages of story content and premium cardstock covers on every issue, BENJAMIN #1 will materialize in comic shops everywhere on June 18, 2025 with hallucinatory covers by multiple Eisner Award winner Christian Ward (Batman: City of Madness, Spectregraph), acclaimed interior artist Leomacs (Joe Hill’s Refrigerator Full of Heads), and visionary artist Malachi Ward (Black Hammer Reborn).

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