Martyr Loser King: A Graphic Novel

by Saul Williams, Morgan Sorne (Illustrator)

Incisive questions about capitalism, colonialism, and the future of technology abound in this cyberpunk fable from visionary poet, performer, and director Saul Williams.

In Martyr Loser King, the East Africa country of Burundi is a source of the precious mineral coltan, a component of every technology on earth. The people who mine coltan are exploited, and the land around the mines is used by the rest of the world as a dumping ground for defunct machines. But from the rubble, creativity and rebellion rise in the form of a hacker who calls himself Martyr_Loser_King and an otherworldly stranger named Neptune Frost. Together, they launch a cyberattack that reverberates throughout the world. But the world is too focused on old enemies to recognize a new transformative force that seeks not destruction, but rebirth and understanding.

Steeped in mythology and history but inspired by present-day events, Martyr Loser King offers a glimpse of a future that feels far from impossible.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Comics, Graphic Novels Comics

336 pages, Hardcover

Published April 28, 2026

About the author

Saul Williams is an acclaimed American poet, musician, actor, and filmmaker whose work fuses raw political insight, lyrical intensity, and a bold disregard for genre boundaries. Widely recognized for his dynamic presence in both spoken word and alternative hip hop, Williams emerged in the mid-1990s as a vital voice in contemporary poetry before expanding into music, theater, film, and literature.
Born in Newburgh, New York, Williams studied acting and philosophy at Morehouse College and later earned an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. It was in New York's vibrant poetry scene that he honed his distinctive voice—fusing personal narrative, political urgency, and rhythmic precision. His breakout came in 1996 when he was named Grand Slam Champion at the Nuyorican Poets Café. He soon co-wrote and starred in the film Slam (1998), a bold meditation on incarceration, art, and resistance. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and the Camera d’Or at Cannes, launching Williams into international prominence.
Williams has published several collections of poetry, including The Seventh Octave, Said the Shotgun to the Head, and The Dead Emcee Scrolls, which reflect his ability to merge the cadence of hip hop with spiritual and philosophical inquiry. His writing is known for its fierce social critique and experimental form, often pushing beyond traditional poetic boundaries to embrace typography, performance, and digital culture.
As a musician, Williams has created a genre-defying body of work that blends hip hop, punk, rock, electronic, and spoken word. His debut album Amethyst Rock Star (2001), produced by Rick Rubin, was followed by the critically acclaimed self-titled Saul Williams (2004). He collaborated with Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor on The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! (2007), a provocative, pay-what-you-want release that challenged music industry norms and addressed race, identity, and digital freedom. Later albums such as Volcanic Sunlight, MartyrLoserKing, and Encrypted & Vulnerable further showcased his global perspective and political urgency, incorporating influences from African rhythms, industrial noise, and cyberpunk aesthetics.
In theater, Williams originated the lead role in Holler If Ya Hear Me, the Broadway musical inspired by the lyrics of Tupac Shakur. As an actor, he has appeared in films like Today, Akilla’s Escape, and Neptune Frost—the latter of which he co-directed with Anisia Uzeyman. Neptune Frost premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and exemplifies Williams’ vision of “sonic fiction,” combining sci-fi, Afrofuturism, and social commentary in a deeply poetic cinematic language.
Williams is also known for his global activism, his commitment to nonconformity, and his exploration of identity. He describes himself as queer and has consistently used his platform to advocate for justice, equality, and creative freedom. His life and work reflect a boundary-crossing ethos, uniting the spiritual and the political, the poetic and the revolutionary.
Across all mediums, Saul Williams defies categorization. Whether through verse, film, or song, he invites audiences to question, to imagine, and to awaken. His artistry continues to inspire new generations of poets, musicians, and thinkers worldwide.

Reviews

[Tess Raser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please ignore the negative reviews written by white people; they did not understand this beautiful, thought provoking, anti-imperialist, Afrocentric work of art. They see the world and art through a Eurocentric lens, which Saul Williams rejects. I am not a big reader of graphic novels, but this was one of the first I read that was written in beautiful and sophisticated language. Williams doesn't just rely on the art to tell the story, and instead, his words are what pull me into each page. As I read, I kept thinking of his framing of the text rooted in understanding coltan and cobalt mining in DRC, Burundi and Rwanda, as connected to digital technology but reliant on "analogue forms of exploitation."

I've been a fan of Williams for a long time. Try and see him perform live every time he's in town, and I loved "Neptune Frost," the filmic representation of this story. The story presented here might seem fantastic or magical, but really it is an allegory for how we get free from imperialism and racial capitalism---the most exploited among us will destroy these very fragile systems that are exploiting us. We will hack the system, we are hacking the system, hacking the system has been a part of the Black radical tradition. Not many others can shift between the profound and colloquial in their language, in the way that Saul Williams does.

Although very different, I was reminded often of Toni Cade Bambara---like Bambara, Williams never over explains, the narrative structure is unconventional, and we as readers are trusted to decode the text, especially if we have rooted much of our reading practice in decolonial and revolutionary texts. This book is a gorgeous, thoughtful, powerful gift to us---us who "suffer from too much brilliance and a lack of men un-seduced by power." I read this in a day, and I'll think I'll read it again this weekend.

Everyone should read this book. I can't believe Williams began working on this thrilling work of art over ten years because because is more relevant today in the midst of genocide, AI takeover and a resurgence in white supremacist ideology.

[Fiona Davis · Rating 2 out of 5]

⭐️✨

I really, really wanted to like this, but sadly didn’t.

This is an incredibly ambitious project. It tries to tackle a broad range of themes and social issues through this multi-dimensional setting and a host of strange characters, with a mix of mythological and cybernetic imagery. The art is incredibly striking, shifting between black and white tones and vibrant colors. And Saul Williams’ career as a poet and musician shine through, as so many lines intertwine philosophy, commentary, rhythm, and poetry.

But sadly, while I love the ideas for this project, the execution is chaotic, messy, and confusing. It doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be surreal and amorphous, or to have a complex but followable plot. There are several plot lines, dimensions, and characters, and the art style fails to make each element distinct. Instead, everything becomes muddled and confusing. And while Williams attempts to make every word deeply, deeply meaningful, it often feels like someone using a lot of big, grandiose words to say nothing at all. Or perhaps, Williams tries to talk about so much that he ends up failing to address anything at all.

It’s clear that the writer and illustrator both put a lot of effort into this project, and I’m still interested in checking out some of their other work. But this ultimately felt like it didn’t achieve what it set out to do.

Thank you Netgalley and First Second Books for an advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

[Mariana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oof. Not what I was expecting and not for me, that’s for sure. The art style was not my favorite and the plot was incomprehensible. I could not follow along at all. If you’re into more esoteric content then maybe this is for you, for me it just left me too confused to even want to finish it.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Screen and the Pit
Reading “Martyr Loser King” as a lyrical, unruly, and often brilliant contest between buried labor and digital illusion
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 29th, 2026

Convenience likes to arrive weightless. That is one of technology’s oldest sleights. A phone sits in the hand so cleanly that it hints nothing ugly preceded it, as though metal had volunteered itself into a rectangle and history had had the courtesy to wait outside. “Martyr Loser King,” written by Saul Williams and drawn by Morgan Sorne, begins where that cover story splits. It starts at the seam between the handset and the pit. Plenty of books can tell you that digital life has a dug-up human cost. Williams and Sorne are betting on something harder to land. They want to show that empire does not merely seize land, labor, and minerals. It also hoards the right to decide what counts as knowledge, what counts as connection, what counts as power, and who gets to name the future before the market does.

That wager gives the book its current, and most of its overflow. “Martyr Loser King” calls itself a cyberpunk fable, then spends the rest of its pages testing how much strain that label can take. Its world is fed by coltan extraction, stolen land, military checkpoints, technological dumping, church discipline, and the fear, vigilance, and silence left behind by genocide. Modern devices run on ore. Ore runs on bodies. Bodies are treated as expendable. Williams gives the logistics straight: the digging, the guarding, the grinding, the bodies spent to keep the device light. But the novel refuses to stay a responsible-consumer sermon. The mine becomes account book, grave, archive, and switchboard all at once. The soil keeps footprints, blood, labor, and fear. A dead brother refuses to remain obediently dead. Birds are not there to lend atmosphere. They circulate another kind of knowing. Rhythm is not ornament. It structures thought. Here hacking does not mean slipping past a firewall. It means cutting into the stories power tells about itself until the wiring starts to glare through the page.

The book begins where it has to, with obedience. Before Matalusa becomes a miner, a mourner, a visionary, or a node in a global breach, he is a “good boy.” Williams understands that revolt is less interesting if we skip the little institutions that trained it into necessity. Church, exams, family pressure, gendered expectation, the command to behave, pass, and keep one’s inward life untranslated, all of that arrives first. These early pages have a battered clarity. Tekno, the brother who keeps surfacing inside the book’s logic long after his death, matters not only as grief but as unfinished philosophy. He carries the novel’s speculative pressure before the novel has fully learned how to name it. By the time the role of the good boy is renounced, the break lands because the book has already shown how much machinery was invested in keeping that role intact.

From there the novel stops moving neatly upward and begins loading the page sideways. Matalusa’s account of the mine and the theft of his family’s land. The old extractive order, still running, merely fitted with newer hardware. The haven of Unanimous Goldmine, where Frost the bird, Neptune, Memory, Elohel, Psychology, Innocent, and others widen the field. Then the scale jumps. A global cyberattack spills outward. MartyrLoserKing becomes both person and signal. Media panic follows. Authorities go looking for a culprit and, failing that, for a category roomy enough to label as threat what they cannot narrate as order. The novel’s deepest question is not simply Who hacked the world? It is What does hacking name in a world already built on forced entry, into land, body, labor, memory, and value?

That question keeps “Martyr Loser King” from shrinking into a civics tract about devices and their hidden costs. Williams refuses to let code float above history. He drags it back into the mine, the colony, the plantation logic that sorted people into functions long before the motherboard arrived. The book’s bluntest equation is also its meanest: digital modernity likes to imagine itself immaterial, but its circuitry inherits the old cruelty. Coltan bridges the hand-held present and the extractive past. The language around dust, blood, grinding, circuitry, and memory hammers this home because the novel will not permit the fantasy of untouched palms. No cloud floats free of the earth here. The cloud is powered by somebody else’s ground, and the ground remembers being dug.

What gives the novel its main conductor, though, is not the argument alone. It is Williams’s prose. This is not the smooth, explanatory language that keeps graphic novels moving politely from panel to panel. Williams writes in loops, refrains, pronouncements, prayers, jokes, slogans, riffs, and little detonations of argument. He worries words until they spark. Mine, power, memory, connection, understanding, belonging, they keep returning, each time with a new voltage. The long “hack into…” litanies are the clearest example. They do not merely decorate the book with verbal heat. They widen hacking into method: hack doctrine, ownership, morality, time, governance, celebrity, superstition, the market, the subconscious. The point is not only that systems are cruel. It is that systems survive by hoarding the language through which people understand them.

At its sharpest, the prose makes theory move at the speed of chant. It lets technical, political, spiritual, and vernacular vocabularies share a page without one asking permission of the others. It also clarifies why the novel cares so much about drums, songs, recurrent beats, and call-and-response patterns. Rhythm here is not atmosphere. It is a method of knowing. It is how memory survives injury. It is how bodies keep count when official history does not. It is how forms of intelligence carried in miners’ hands, women’s warnings, birds’ routes, refugees’ instinct for pattern, and communal improvisation remain audible inside a world determined to mishear them as noise. That is one of the book’s least obvious strengths, and one of its most important.

The method can misfire. What begins as chant can end as pileup. Some repetitions deepen. Others merely restate. Some visionary pages expand the book’s range. Others feel as though another layer of revelation has been added because the novel trusts intensity to produce story weight by sheer insistence. I do not say that grudgingly. Overreach is part of the appeal. Better this than tasteful caution and well-managed lifelessness. Still, there are sequences where the page grows more crowded than cumulative, and where rhetoric carries more pressure than the dramatic situation beneath it can bear.

Sorne’s art keeps that pressure from becoming fatal. He is no secondary hand brought in to illustrate the ideas after the fact. He gives the abstractions humidity, abrasion, and stain. The pages move from stark black-and-white scenes of church, labor, bodily threat, and grief into electrically charged fields of teal and violet, then into layouts where circuitry, weather, spirit, wreckage, foliage, and organism seem fused into one unruly surface. The palette is doing structural work. It tracks the movement from extraction as social fact to extraction as cosmology, from wound to current, from realism to altered state. Sorne is especially good at refusing the machine the privilege of looking sealed. His technology leaks, corrodes, blooms, sprouts. It looks as though a motherboard and a reliquary had been left alone together in a humid room. Faces do not remain stable either. Identity flickers, doubles, loosens, disperses.

The page is scored like music, not like briefing. Scenes settle into recognizable exchanges, then give way to chant pages, symbolic overlays, interface fragments, or sudden spans of charged emptiness. Negative space does real work. It carries suspense, latency, mourning, and held breath. It lets history register not only as record but as hole. The book is not chaptered in any conventional sense. It moves instead through registers: obedience, grief, awakening, gathering, breach, declaration. That suits it. “Martyr Loser King” does not want to be climbed like a ladder. It wants to be entered like weather. When the form clicks, your reading shifts with it. Plot stops being the only engine. Motif, recurrence, signal, and charge take over.

The collaboration earns its keep by turning thesis into climate and climate back into thesis. The novel’s sharpest insight is not finally about hypocrisy, though there is enough of that to power several more books. It is about competing claims on what counts as knowing. Who gets recognized as a knower? Which forms of perception count as reason, and which get dismissed as folklore, madness, queer excess, miner superstition, local noise, women’s intuition? The bird’s guidance, the mourner’s beat, the refugee’s improvisation, the body’s warning systems, the collective’s live adjustments, Williams treats these not as sentimental supplements to politics but as disciplined forms of perception. That is where the book bites down hardest. It is not merely anti-colonial. It is anti-monopoly over interpretation itself.

Just when the rhetoric risks sealing shut, the book cracks wise and lets in air. There is banter, flirtation, irritation, flashes of camp, and the brisk comic timing of people who know the world is ending and still have to negotiate breakfast, suspicion, attraction, pronouns, and who exactly is going to explain the plan. That tonal friction matters. Without it, solemnity would start dressing for a role it had not earned. Unanimous Goldmine, the novel’s great shelter, matters not only because it protects bodies but because it makes room for a different kind of conversation. It is part commune, part server room, part rehearsal space, part room where people can try a thought without being instantly sorted by the state, the church, or the market. Resistance cannot live on denunciation alone. People need somewhere to be difficult together.

The tab arrives in the middle stretch. “Martyr Loser King” is uneven in exactly the way risk tends to be. Its strengths come with splinters still sticking out. Characterization, in the old-fashioned sense, sometimes yields to conduction. Matalusa, Memory, Tekno, Neptune, Elohel, and the others register vividly, but the novel is often more interested in what passes through them than in slow psychological buildup. That thinning of character is deliberate, and not always a mistake. The cost shows up in scenes that carry more statement than shape. In the middle and late movements, theory, signal, media noise, cosmology, and declaration sometimes pile onto the same page at once. The novel wants overfullness. Sometimes overfullness becomes fog.

Even so, I would rather read this kind of wager than the house-trained version of political art. Only loosely, one might think of the prophetic scale of “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler or the politically charged graphic ambition of “Destroyer” by Victor LaValle and Dietrich Smith. The comparison helps chiefly by clarifying what Williams and Sorne refuse to smooth, sort, or stabilize. They are after something less disciplined and more openly musical. They are willing to let poetry, manifesto, cosmology, grief ritual, internet detritus, and graphic narrative rub elbows on the same page. Sometimes they rub too hard. Sometimes that friction is exactly the point.

The novel never has to lean on topicality, because its materials are already the junk drawer and bloodstream of the present tense: mined metal, discarded hardware, outsourced suffering, managed attention. It knows the supposedly clean future still runs on dug-up matter and on people forced to absorb the toxicity of progress. It also knows how quickly power renames interruption as terror. The late media pages bite for that reason. Once MartyrLoserKing becomes a name that starts behaving like a chorus, authority’s question is not What truth has been exposed? but Who can be blamed, and how fast can blame be translated into a threat category? Williams catches with nasty accuracy the speed at which obscurity becomes illegibility becomes criminality. He is sharper still on the comeback: we are not hidden, we are ignored; not ignored, unloved; not unloved, sacrificed; not sacrificed, murdered. The anger there is obvious. Less obvious, and more interesting, is the question under it: who gets seen, counted, and narrated on human terms?

The ending refuses tidy housekeeping. MartyrLoserKing cannot be folded back into a single culprit or tamed as plot. By the time the repeated declaration, “I am the Martyr Loser King,” arrives in full, it no longer reads as vanity or slogan. The singular has gone plural. A name becomes a shared grammar of refusal. A hacker becomes a pronoun carried by more than one body. The novel does not close by claiming the system has been defeated. It closes by rewriting the terms of legibility. That is harder, stranger, and more lasting than simple victory. It also explains why the ending stays where other passages only flare. Many political novels raise consciousness and call it a day. This one tries to reroute how consciousness travels, through the page, through chant, through the feed, through whatever channel power forgot to seal.

I land at 88/100, or 4 out of 5 stars: a book with actual nerve, often brilliant, often overpacked, never inert. Its best pages do more than remind you that the device in your hand has a buried history. They make the screen feel lit from below by excavation, as though convenience had been glowing all along with the afterimage of the pit.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Martyr Loser King is definitely an ambitious work, and Saul Williams has no shortage of bold ideas. The themes (technology, activism, power, and resistance) come across loud and clear.

However, I really struggled with following any kind of plot. The narrative felt fragmented, and while I could sense what Williams was trying to convey on a larger scale, it was hard for me to stay grounded in the story itself. The artwork, while striking, often made things more confusing rather than clarifying. I found myself flipping back pages trying to figure out how things connected.

If you’re reading primarily for mood, message, and imagery, you’ll probably get something out of it. But if you’re someone who needs a clearer sense of storyline or structure, this might feel too abstract to really sink into.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an early copy in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

[Pais · Rating 2 out of 5]

Martyr Loser King is a new graphic novel from the artist/poet/musician Saul Williams. In a way, it's an adaptation of his 2016 album of the same name, but it's also an adaptation of his 2022 film, Neptune Frost, that deals with the same narrative elements, characters, and themes:

• colonialist exploitation of the Global South, particularly Africans in coltan mines as a modern-day incarnation of cotton & slavery
• resisting binaries—both in the form of digital colonization and gender—through hacking and greater consciousness

Of the three mediums to present these ideas/stories, this graphic novel adaptation is the least successful. Many of the characters and inner/outer dialogue are taken directly from the album and movie, but without Williams' music or stunning visuals, the ideas fall flat. The book mixes a grounded narrative with Williams' high-minded philoso-poetry, but the latter is extremely dense and meandering when placed in prose, better-suited to a poetry collection than to a fictional universe where these thoughts and words actually emerge from people's mouths.

If you're interested in these themes, I'd recommend watching Neptune Frost but skipping this graphic novel version.

[erica utti-hodge ✨ · Rating 2 out of 5]

from the blurb, i really thought i would love the experience of reading this graphic novel, but it fell short in a few ways.

the art is gorgeous--some pages of this novel could easily be blown up as posters or put in a gallery. however, the strength of the art mostly lies in sci-fi illustration rather than character, which made it difficult to read the emotions of the characters throughout the story. the use of color was intentional and well done, and helped to organize the story better, but it was still difficult to follow overall.

this novel is toted to be about capitalism, colonialism, and the future of technology--and it is about all of those things--but the story is difficult to follow which means the narrative falls short. the writing is poetic overall, poignant at some times but word-salad at others. i wish that the author's note was put at the beginning; it is clear that Williams is incredibly intelligent and prophetic, but it is difficult to retrofit these concepts onto an unclear story.

i think this graphic novel would make an amazing movie, and would be interested in seeing the film Neptune Frost, but i wouldn't necessarily recommend this book to others.

[Alexis Travis · Rating 2 out of 5]

This just simply was not for me. The summary of this book caught my eye and I love graphic novels, but the execution fell flat for me. I felt like this was a fever dream and not in a good way. I was very confused at times, the art became too busy at times and distracted from the story, all the characters seemed to be loosing their mind or maybe it was just me, and at times it was really hard to read some of the text.

There are lots of pros to it: it covers very important themes and topics that 100% should be discussed, the representation for the queer community is there and I really appreciated it, it spans through issues over many timelines.

I do recommend this to someone who loves a more poetic prose and has more of an attention span that my ADHD self, I got so lost.

Thank you to Saul Williams, Netgalley, and First Second Books for the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

As usually happens, the concept of this graphic novel is great, that people who are being explointed for a mineral that the world needs, rise up, and hack into the world network to get back for all the horror that has come from mining this.

There is a wise man, and a transgender man, and a man who has lost his brother, and a solider, and someone who talks to a bird. They all get together.

But, the story got too confusing from there. The art was hard to follow, and there is a lot of talking. A lot of talking. Sometimes too much talking. The author is a poet, so I understand wantingto use that talent, but it slowed the story down.

This book is probably for someone else.

But not for me.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review. This book will be published the 28th of April 2026.

[Al · Rating 3 out of 5]

The art and particularly the use of color in this graphic novel was absolutely stunning, which is most of the reason that I am giving this book three stars. Unfortunately, I could not follow the story of this book at all. I believe I understood most of the very basic premise, but the specifics were very hard to follow and I feel like I did not get to know any of the characters. I have never seen the short film or listened to the album that this graphic novel is based on, and perhaps I would have enjoyed this more if I had. I did like the themes of colonialism, capitalism, and how modern technology has managed to re-invent slavery though and wish I had felt that theme more strongly though the book.

[Margo Jacques · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unanimous Goldmine.
Martyr Loser King is unique, artistic, poetic, psychedelic, and intelligent. It's giving Funkadelic while critiquing capitalism and colonialism through the lens of coltan miners in Africa that find a solar punk haven to live in. Some of the dialogue flows so perfectly you can find the cadence to read it in time. I have never experience a graphic novel like this, but expected nothing less from Saul Williams.

[Heidi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an eARC for me to review!

This one is for the fans of very high level science fiction!! The art is great and ties in so well with the story, with wonderfully individual designs for all the characters. Definitely one of those books you have to sit down and focus on, it was very intriguing all the way through. Not a favourite, but I think part of that is I'm just not into the intense sci-fi right now.

[₳฿Ɽ₳Ӿ₳₴ ĐɆ₦łɆĐ · Rating 5 out of 5]

a gorgeous mixture of written word and hand drawn art to craft something of human excellence - a beautiful frame to fit Saul William’s poetry for those new to graphic novels, and a comic full of substance for those shy to poetry - the medium bridges the gaps the same way the ideas do, to form a vessel fit for digesting such material - which is heavy, and haunting, and honest. thought provoking and spiritual, Martyr Loser King is as devastating as it is delightful.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The art style and story were hard to follow most of the time. I felt the themes were strongly shown throughout, but this project felt more like a visual aid for Williams’ lyrics and poetry than a comprehensive story. I think putting that in the synopsis might give people better expectations going in.

Overall this book will stick with me and has sparked my interest in Williams’ other work.

[JXR · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not the most interesting, with an unusual plot and vibes that just don't quite land. 2 stars. tysm for the E-ARC

[Jerry Summers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Graphic discussion of greed especially on the African continent. Take back. Hack back.

[Ed · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like a lot of graphic novel art/layout doesn’t register communicate with me and this is one. Look forward to watching Neptune Frost though.