Benjamin Marra on Why He Hates Redemption Stories (and What He Does Instead)

Transmission 389: Interview with Benjiamin Marra

Benjamin Marra is one of the most peculiar voices working in contemporary comic-book, whose work fuses exploitation cinema, underground comix, superhero pulp, and formalist experimentation into something entirely his own. Known for his bold, confrontational graphic novels such as Night Business, Lincoln Washington: Free Man!, and Terror Assaulter, he crafts work that functions as a high-art tribute to vintage action conventions and renegade comic book sensibilities. The majority of his work has been self-published under his own brand, Traditional Comics, and it generally consists of inexpensive, black-and-white comics. He has built a reputation for combining hyper-violent genre storytelling with rigorous attention to the mechanics of comics as a medium. Restricted to PBS as a child, he’d wake up early to sneak episodes of He-Man and GI Joe. He was an anxious kid, deeply affected by visual violence and horror. Though he learned to read from Tintin, the first comic he ever chose for himself was Darick Robertson’s Space Beaver (read our interview with Darick Robertson). He received his BFA in Illustration from Syracuse University and his MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Benjamin Marra initially drew just for personal satisfaction, but his time in college and grad school forced him to question his creative motives.

This introspection ultimately led to a desire to create work rooted in raw power, drawings filled with intense action, over-the-top emotion, and savage energy. If you have ever flipped through his comic, you know the feeling of immediate, intoxicating sensory overload. His pages bleed with the unapologetic energy, hyper-masculine of 1980s VHS action movies, grindhouse cinema, and the sort of forbidden, indie comics. But beneath the glossy muscles, and calculated trash-culture aesthetics, lies the mind of a deeply visual artist. He occupies a rare space where pulp aesthetics and serious formal inquiry coexist without contradiction. Benjamin Marra pushed gritty comics into strange, explosive, and often deeply funny territory, drawing disposable culture and against respectability. His illustrations have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Playboy. His sprawling, in-progress graphic magnum opus, What We Mean by Yesterday, released through Fantagraphics, represents a significant leap forward in his career.  Born as a frantic, page-a-day experiment drawn for Instagram, is fast, loose, experimental, and easily ambitious narrative. The intersection of his high art education, pulp aesthetics, and his evolution into digital strip formats is very central to this project that is expanding  with new outcoming volumes. He lives and works in Montreal.

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Related articles: Review of What We Mean by Yesterday: Vol. 1 ; What We Mean by Yesterday: Vol. 2

“What We Mean by Yesterday: Vol. 2”, has pulled off a massive bait-and-switch, completely resets the board, and drops readers into a lo-fi, picaresque medieval landscape, following Ninkugel, a devious peasant.

You’ve said that your style was born from ‘missing the mark’ and that you had to learn to ‘trust your instincts and celebrate your deficiencies as a draftsman’ to get back to the raw joy of making art. How did you find the balance between maintaining technical control and satisfying your own creative ideals? Was there a specific revelatory moment or epiphany you could share with us?

The balance is always a struggle, but I’ve found that the more I draw, the more I find that balance. It’s like the more quantity I produce, the closer to a plateau I reach, where the balance is located. I had an epiphany when drawing directly with ink, not penciling or planning anything out, just drawing with ink and making up an image as I went along. I found the results more interesting than if I’d planned something out, and the image felt truer to me.

Because “What We Mean by Yesterday” was drawn at a pace of one page a day for Instagram, you were essentially moving forward without a safety net. When you painted yourself into a narrative corner or had to make tough choices for Bruce, how did you resist the urge to go back and retroactively plant clues on earlier pages? How did you learn to trust the ‘first thought, best thought’ philosophy over the course of 549 pages?

Thankfully, I never ran into a narrative corner when I was creating WWMBY. Because each strip was a response to the previous one. It flowed out of me, and I just rode the wave. I didn’t have to trust the “first thought, best thought” philosophy because I wasn’t aware of it. I was just doing it and seeing where the story went. It was almost as if I were experiencing the story for the first time as a reader.

You had over 20,000 people reading this daily as it happened. Did the immediate feedback loop of social media comments alter where Bruce went next? How much did the weight of reader feedback influence the story’s direction? Did you find yourself actively pushing back to keep them off-balance?

I don’t know if I had 20,000 people reading it. That’s my follower count, but I think the readership was probably 1/10 of that, and the ones who actually commented were 1/10 of that. The immediate feedback from social media comments encouraged me to keep going, but it didn’t influence the story. I already knew where the story was going before I posted a strip, and often had already created about a week’s worth of strips in advance. It was entertaining to see what readers said about the strip, and sometimes their ideas were better than mine. I didn’t actively try to keep them off balance. I tried to keep myself off balance. And, by extension, the readers were off-balance.

“What We Mean by Yesterday: Vol. 1 ” has a very unusual rhythm because it was born as a daily strip experiment before becoming a brick-sized collected edition.

Is Bruce a product of a stressed, toxic society, or an ironic critique of the classic power fantasy? How important was it to you that his rage wasn’t just a continuous high, but a series of reactive, painful jolts? If you hook up Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 to the same thematic matrix, what are you ultimately saying about accountability in both modern and ancient men?

I haven’t thought about those themes that much. I try to create the stories I want to read and find entertaining as I create them. But looking back, I can see the themes in them, after the stories have been told (or at least portions of the characters’ stories). With Bruce, I wanted to try to write a story that was about an “every man.” I’d been working in pulp and genre fiction for a while and wanted to do something that was a little more true to life, I guess. I’d always wanted to create a comic that was more about domestic modern life. With Ninkugel, I wanted to create an homage to my favorite writer, Jack Vance. But both Bruce and Ninkugel are examinations of male behavior. What I’m trying to say and what conclusions I reach, I can’t say. That’s up to the reader or those who want to try to interpret what I’ve written.

Volume 1 traps us in Bruce’s modern meltdown, while Volume 2 pivots to a medieval world starring Ninkugel. When finishing Volume 1, did you always know ‘Yesterday’ would span different eras, or did Bruce’s story fracture so completely that it opened a portal into a new book? How does that title recontextualize itself now that we’ve moved from a modern city to ancient villages? The title implies a collective ‘we.’ Who is included in that ‘we,’ and who definitely isn’t?

When I was nearing the end of Volume 1, I knew I wanted to continue doing a daily comic strip. I knew I wanted to do Ninkugel’s story, which had been in my mind for many years. For me, it was an interesting creative choice to make such a jarring transition to a new world. That was exciting. And I felt gleeful when I shocked readers with that turn. I wanted them to know that anything is possible with WWMBY. Creatively, WWMBY became a place where all my story ideas could find a home. But all the stories will also be interconnected. Bruce is the linchpin or fulcrum on which all the stories turn. I honestly haven’t thought much about how the title recontextualizes itself based on the different eras of the stories. I wanted the title to be suggestive, provoking thought and mystery. I wanted it to make readers ask questions. But I don’t think much about how it applies to the stories, to be honest. 

He is both a serious formalist and a pulp lifer at the same time, his work really depends on the tension between them.

Ninkugel is an amazing character because he lacks traditional heroic virtues; he accidentally causes a plague, scams a village, and regularly leaves people for dead. Is it more liberating to write a character who is totally unapologetic about his self-interest compared to a character like Bruce, who represses his rage until he snaps?

Yes, Ninkugel is a lot of fun to write. And it’s fun to occupy his thought processes given a situation. I should say that he is an amalgamation of Jack Vance’s roguish character Cugel and another mystery character from pop culture, whom I won’t reveal. 

Although Bruce and Ninkugel the Self live vastly different lives, they both face the unexpected head-on, with no ifs, ands, or buts, resulting in broken teeth, bloody noses, and severed limbs. Your work uses violence in ways that feel funny, grotesque, heroic, and critical all at once. Where do you see the line between irony and sincerity in pulp aesthetics?

I don’t see the line, for better or worse. I’m very sincere about the stories I tell, but there is a note of irony in them as well, I can’t deny. I think if you don’t have sincerity in what you’re writing, you shouldn’t write it. If one intends to write an ironic story, the reader can tell it’s insincere. To me, violence is a means of evoking emotion in the reader. Maybe it’s a cheap way, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind. 

Many cartoonists aim for ‘invisible’ storytelling, but his work constantly reminds the reader they’re looking at drawings. His pages feel extremely controlled even when the stories are chaotic.

What is the true structural role of the ‘dark guy’ in Bruce’s story? Is it a deliberate narrative device to lock his identity in as the victim, thereby neutralizing the threat of his transforming into the executioner?

By the “dark guy,” I’m guessing you mean Kafka, Bruce’s student who wears a black trench coat and has the face paint of The Crow. The role he plays will be explored later on in the upcoming chapters of WWMBY. He serves as a mysterious element in the overall narrative. He breaks up the flow of the story at junctures to subtly affect it. Beyond that purpose, I’ve only thought about the forthcoming story ideas I have for him.

Bruce is simultaneously pathetic, heroic, dangerous, and spiritually hollow. Dawn offers him a sanctuary from violence through sex and psychedelics. Given the massive portraits of her and her husband in her home, what can you tell us about her background, and what thematic statement were you making through her?

Looking back at the story, her character comes into stark relief. I didn’t plan for Dawn to become who she was. I discovered who she was based on her choices as the story unfolded. To me, Dawn represents a freedom that is alien to Bruce. She does what she wants, says what she wants, and is unafraid of the outcome. Her background is that she’s a happily married, very wealthy woman, but those things don’t constrain who she is.

There’s a classic ‘scorpion and the frog’ fatalism to Ninkugel’s journey. As a creator writing a protagonist who possesses absolutely zero growth, do you have to actively fight the urge to give him a redemptive moment? Do you push him all the way to the executioner’s block just to make the reader accept his ‘simple nature’?

I actually hate redemption stories a lot of the time. And I’ve seen examinations of stories with protagonists who have a “flat” story arc while the world bends around them. I do think that Ninkugel’s unwillingness to change is ultimately what gets him into trouble, and yet he never learns. I see this as more entertaining than watching him redeem himself.

“What We Mean by Yesterday Vol. 1” feels highly conceptual, the story keeps mutating genres: workplace comedy, crime story, hallucination, cosmic nightmare. At some point, the story feels less like a comic and more like a sustained altered state.

When readers finally uncover the truth and deception of the village elders, it delivers this massive, Lovecraftian reveal that acts as an incredibly dark piece of satire. Is this world meant to be a literal fantasy sandbox, or is it a grotesque mirror of world economic systems, where an elite class grinds down the vulnerable to generate its own wealth?

I certainly believe, like most people, the elites of the world, hoarding wealth they can never spend, that they’ve accrued through the exploitation of the masses, is inherently evil. If that belief is making its way into my stories, then I’d be okay with it. It also felt to me like a reflection of the belief systems we have as humans that make us collectively do awful things to one another. But, like I’ve said, I didn’t plan out that twist until I got to that point in the story. It’s something that felt true.

Your comics have this incredibly ‘fast’ energy, even though the compositions are clearly highly controlled. There’s a real sense of obsession, compulsion, and extremity in your work. Do you think making a great cartoon requires a certain level of morbid curiosity?

No, but maybe. All I can say is what makes me interested in drawing, or obsessed with drawing, rather. And that’s the exploration of formal processes. I, for whatever reason, can’t seem to figure out drawing, and that feeling of trying to figure it out is what keeps me drawing, because I’m not satisfied with the results. I’m never satisfied with the results. I want to keep stripping down the drawing to its most essential lines and forms. I think I’m getting closer, but then I look at other cartoonist luminaries’ works and feel like I’m so far away from what they’ve achieved, and I have to keep pushing forward.

A lot of alternative comics today emphasize autobiography and vulnerability. What part of yourself do you think appears in your work, no matter how much you shift genres? Moving forward, what scares you more creatively: repeating yourself, or becoming unrecognizable?

Every piece of art is a self-portrait. It’s hard to say what part of me is in my work, because it’s not something I’m completely conscious of. We’re judged based on the things we do unconsciously. I guess what scares me more is repeating myself because I’ve actively tried to avoid that as I continue forward making comics. Becoming unrecognizable actually sounds pretty nice and full of surprises.

Illustrator and comic book artist Benjamin Marra, who is nominated for a Grammy, conducts a deep look at philosophy, psychology, art history, black comedy, and pulp film. 

Your books feel like they come from a parallel comics history where underground comics, EC horror, and action movies evolved into one thing. Is the comic a controlled descent into chaos, or a method for organizing chaos?

You encapsulated all the things that have influenced me very succinctly. The comic is a method for organizing chaos, but if you can disguise it as a descent into it, you are doing it masterfully. Comics have to organize chaos, or they fail on their most basic level to communicate a story.

Photo and images courtesy of © Benjiamin Marra

Dominique Musorrafiti

Ciao! My name is Dominique. I’m Italian and I’m proud to be a mix. My father was an Italian chemical engineer and high school teacher, with Greek and Polish heritage. My mother is Haitian, she was high school language teacher, with Dominican, Spanish, French, Portuguese, African and Native American heritage. Being a mix makes me appreciate to want to understand different cultures and lifestyles. I grew up in Italy, lived few years in Haiti, travel around main European capitals, lived many years in China, in Spain and UK. Traveling makes me feel that we can learn something from every situation in every part of the world.