Martyr Loser King
Writer: Saul Williams
Artist: Morgan Stone
Publisher: 23rd Street
Publication Date: April 2026
For more than a decade now, the musician/poet/actor/film director Saul Williams has been telling one story in different ways, across space and time and narrative mediums. And this spring that story has come to comics, with the release of Martyr Loser King, which sees Williams as a writer collaborating with artist Morgan Stone on this new graphic novel.
And as Williams writes in his author’s note at the end of this book, the roots of this project trace back to 2011 and Dakar, Senegal. Williams was shooting a film there, and the idea that would become this evolving multi-media story came to him. He traces the initiating spark to a walk he took there, on which he saw a teenager listening to music through a smartphone while building a sabar, which is an ancient Senegalese drum.
“What fascinated me was that ancient and modern technologies existed side by side,” Williams writes in his author’s note. “It was then that I began thinking of the drum as the oldest form of wireless communication.”
Since then, the spark of that idea has led to the creation of a trio of Williams’ albums — MartyrLoserKing, Encrypted & Vulnerable, and Unanimous Goldmine (The Original Soundtrack of Neptune Frost) — as well as the 2021 film, Neptune Frost. And now it continues within the pages of this new graphic novel.
But, to be clear, there is not one narrative running through the work of this project. Or, at least, not one that would feel linear and dependent on the other entries in this series. There’s not, for example, a cliffhanger ending to the film that is directly addressed in the graphic novel.
No, each of these works stands well on their own, and while there are a good number of commonalities between them, what truly feels like the unifying quality is not character or plot, but rather the challenge they pose to the audiences. This is a challenge to think more deeply about the way we live, about what it costs both us as well as others of the world, whose exploitation is now and has been for some time a foundation of our technologies and the economics that make them work.
I will be honest, as I read Martyr Loser King, there were moments that I was unclear on the plot and the characters. I wasn’t confused, but I was unmoored in the action, floating among the beautiful artwork as well as Williams’ lyrical dialogue and captioning. But that didn’t hurt the experience, and, I suspect, it was actually the entire point. And the ethereal quality of the writing and art was so compelling, that I was still anxious to go from page to page.
Drifting through the words and imagery, I never lost sight of the ideas or themes that were powering the book. Throughout my reading of Martyr Loser King, I found myself thinking and feeling deeply about consumerism, e-waste, exploitation, and the value cycles of modern life, the way that we think primarily about the technology in our hands, and not what it cost to get there, what it costs us on larger scale to put so much of our attention and lives into it, so much that we are willing to ignore both how its made and what happens once it is discarded to make room for the next commodity. This book makes you feel every ripple.
There’s just such a steady juxtaposition in Martyr Loser King between the presence of the ancient and the new technologies. It extends past the physical. There are plenty of scenes herein that give Stone a chance to draw wonderful, fantastic imagery and characters and action, including structures made from discarded technologies like TVs. But the book also juxtaposes ideas like cheap smartphone production with long histories of colonialist exploitation, too.
And I think it’s in this way that it strikes at the deeper themes and feelings that I found to be the unifying quality of the book. To some extent, I can’t quite intellectualize this book, but I know I will be thinking about it for a very long time to come.
This is all to say that I really enjoyed my time with Martyr Loser King, a singular and interesting comics work that invites readers to get lost in its nebulousness, with the promise of bringing them through to the other side as a more thoughtful, feeling being.
Martyr Loser King is available now via 23rd Street
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