MARTYRLOSERKING

Saul Williams’ New Book ‘Martyr Loser King’ Turns Cyberpunk Into Creative Rebellion

By Okla Jones · Updated July 14, 2025

The multidisciplinary artist’s upcoming graphic novel reframes sci-fi through a Black radical lens, spotlighting the power of community and collective consciousness.

Saul Williams has never followed a linear path. Whether through poetry, music, film, or performance, his work defies convention and interrogates systems with rhythmic force and radical clarity. Now, with his upcoming graphic novel debut Martyr Loser King, the multidisciplinary artist offers his boldest vision yet—a cyberpunk epic that fuses mythology, activism, and Afrofuturism to challenge our relationship with technology, power, and each other.

Set in Burundi, the novel revolves around a hacker and a cosmic being—Martyr_Loser_King and Neptune Frost—who rise from the ruins of global exploitation to launch a digital insurrection. The East African nation, rich in coltan (a mineral vital to tech manufacturing), becomes ground zero for a confrontation between capitalist greed and collective consciousness. Williams began crafting this narrative more than a decade ago.

“Actually, it was 2012 when I first conceived of Martyr Loser King as a multimedia—multidisciplinary—project,” Williams tells ESSENCE. “I conceptualized the project as a graphic novel and a musical for the stage. The musical eventually became Neptune Frost… but they were always conceived as different wings of the same project.”

The project’s inspiration is deeply rooted in real-world issues. Williams began researching extractive industries after a 2011 trip to Senegal with co-creator and partner Anisia Uzeyman. There, the couple encountered stories of e-waste dumps and communities ravaged by global tech’s hidden costs. “It was clearly a continuation of the imperial forces countries rich in resources like the Congo & the continent in general have now faced for generations,” he says.

Choosing Burundi as the story’s setting wasn’t accidental. “I was interested in science fiction and didn’t want people’s imaginations to be immediately squatted by any ‘tragic’ sense of history or reality,” he explains. “Bujumbura, the capital, is known throughout the region for its beauty, great music, food, and lively atmosphere.” Williams also cites personal connections—Anisia’s time there and stories from her mother—as key inspirations.

Through characters like Frost and Martyr_Loser_King, Williams dives into the tension between analog resistance and digital evolution, crafting a world where rebellion takes shape through code, sound, and spirit. The graphic novel format gave him the freedom to imagine without limitation—unbound by the logistical constraints of filmmaking. Instead of calculating production budgets or coordinating effects, he could lean fully into the surreal. This creative liberty helped expand the scope of his story, pushing the boundaries of what storytelling can look like in a future shaped by technology and ancestral memory.

But this novel is more than a sci-fi adventure. It’s a deeply philosophical meditation on surveillance, identity, and survival in the face of dehumanizing systems. Williams balances social commentary with mythic storytelling, without softening either edge. “We are living in a moment where the socio-political realities feel, in many ways, ‘overpowering,’” he says. “Art serves a purpose to highlight, and explore in ways that can challenge us to grow beyond or confront the realities we face.”

Williams sees his upcoming release in the lineage of the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement—moments where art became a tool of both resistance and celebration. “The balance is life itself,” he says. “Art on the other hand, is a vehicle and platform meant to enrich the dialogue… The power of the imagination is stretching beyond the confines of lived experience and exploring possibilities that may shed light on our shared human condition and conditioning.”

As someone who built his career through various mediums, Williams approached the graphic novel form with both curiosity and intention. While the structure of sequential art presented a new challenge—requiring a clear narrative arc from beginning to end—it also offered a canvas for continuity, pulling from years of conceptual experimentation across his earlier works. Albums like The Inevitable Rise & Liberation of Niggy Tardust and poetry collections such as Said the Shotgun to the Head served as foundational exercises in thematic storytelling, preparing him to transition into longform narratives. The graphic novel format became the next step in his multidisciplinary journey.

At the core of Martyr Loser King is a meditation on technology, and a reflection of who we are and what we value. The story suggests that technological tools are neutral by nature; it’s how we wield them that determines their impact. True change, it argues, doesn’t lie in digital disruption alone but in the systems we build around it. Williams underscores the importance of collective action and creative resistance, urging readers to recognize that transformation starts not with the machine, but with the mind, and the communities willing to reimagine what’s possible.

Ultimately, Williams hopes readers come away from Martyr Loser King with more than aesthetic awe. “We will need to be ‘firing from all engines’ if we are to pose any true resistance against the reigning powers,” he says. “But we are masters of creative rebellion, and it continues to be a necessary facet of resistance.”

Martyr Loser King is set for release on April 7, 2026, via 23rd Street Books.

Saul Williams’ Afrofuturist Love Story ‘Martyrloserking’ Gets Film Adaptation

Neptune Frost by AFROPUNK veteran MartyrLoserKing aka Saul Williams is a visual love story between an intersex runway and a coltan miner and the virtual marvel born out of their union. An Afrofuturist sci-fi musical tale written and directed by Williams, Neptune Frost takes place in a village of recycled computer parts born on a hilltop in Burundi. An e-waste camp where the world’s most subversive hacking collective exposes the underbelly of the “gluttonous feast on natural resources” taking place by those in power. Led by MartyrLoserKing, the elusive African hacker, the team of “losers” and misfits use deep space to inspire the imagination of the most “connected” generation. The adaptation of Williams’ 2016 album ‘MartyrLoserKing’, this project is one of several components of the final imagined project, which will also include a graphic novel with illustrations by Morgan Sorne.

Learn more about Neptune Frost and how you can support and view the project, here.

SAUL WILLIAMS DISCUSSES UPCOMING GRAPHIC-NOVEL ‘MARTYR LOSER KING’

Poet, actor and musician Saul Williams has announced that he will be delving into the world of comic books with a new graphic-novel titled Martyr Loser King. Williams is creating the illustrative adventure in collaboration with multimedia artist Sorne with a release date set for 2019 via First Second Books. The novel will be a piece of a larger narrative that consists of works in several disciplines, including Williams’ studio album MartyrLoserKing which released last January.

Below is an interview in which Tobias Carroll of Electric Lit had a chance to speak with Williams about the upcoming novel, and the inspiration and intention that formed its cornerstone:

Tobias Carroll: From what I’ve read, Martyr Loser King deals with questions of hacking and surveillance, which are increasingly in the public consciousness. What about them first interested you as a writer? And how did you go about finding your own perspective on them?

Saul Williams: Initially, I would say that I was as interested as anyone else, yet as a witness of the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, the Y’en A Marre movement in Senegal, and the social eruptions triggered by whistle blowers like Chelsea Manning, I began to believe that we have an opportunity to re-wire society and do away with some of the old school paternalistic ideologies that have defined much of our history. The fact that I started piecing these ideas together, specifically while living abroad and wandering the streets of places like Dakar, Senegal, watching kids devour the new tech while tightening the skin on homemade drums, it became fascinating to think of the fusion of the talking drum and handheld computer….

Carroll: This graphic novel is one of several related projects you’re working on, each of in a different medium. Was there one in particular that you began with? At what point, when starting a project, does the idea of doing something that spans several disciplines come into play?

Williams: This idea began, truly, as a graphic novel. I had just finished reading Habibi by Craig Thompson, which I must credit as the straw that broke the camel’s back, when I determined that I had to write in this format because of the freedom that it would afford me as a poet. The idea had been in the back of my mind for years, the main reason being that I found it intriguing that I could structure a story, create characters, narrative, dialogue, and then throw a poem on the wall as graffiti in the background. What I found most inspiring about the format was the possibility of tangents. Some writers play with this idea through footnotes. I loved the possibility of incorporating tangents into the story, it freed me to think in terms of a more circular narrative.

So, I have this idea which I let take shape in my head without writing much of it down. Simultaneously, I’m listening to music and become inspired enough to power on some instruments and play with some sounds. As the sounds take shape I begin thinking of lyrics and every lyrical idea was contextualized by this story buzzing around in my head. So I began writing music for the story before I actually wrote the story. The music gave a sense of atmosphere and ambiance to the world I was envisioning and I thus found myself working in two mediums at once: a graphic novel and an album.

The question of performance was the next logical step and I began to conceptualize the performance as a play, a musical. Maybe that doesn’t seem very logical from the outside, yet my background and first love is theater, and I wanted to find a way to bring my music into such a space, to deliver a once in a lifetime experience for theater goers and music lovers. I also wanted to find a way to stream all of my creative interests in the same direction and BOOM — Martyr Loser King was born.

Carroll: Where do your own tastes in comics fall? Are there any books that first sparked your interest in the medium?

Williams: I love the work of artists like Tanino, the mind of Jodorowsky, the simplicity & humor of Jason, the line work Kazuo Koike and Katushiro Otomo… cyber-punk… of course I think my interest in the medium was probably first sparked by Alan Moore.

Carroll: For Martyr Loser King, did you have any touchstones as far as graphic novels that influenced the project were concerned? Some of the artwork I’ve seen has a very science-fictional look to it, like a book that might have come out in the ’80s or ’90s on Humanoids.

Williams: My touchstones weren’t necessarily from the medium, although I really liked the writing of the Transmetropolitan series, for example, I was also inspired by the creative journalism and art in the French magazine XXI and the Pan African magazine Chimurenga, also the journals of characters like Dan Eldon (The Journey is the Destination) and Binyavanga Wainaina.

Carroll: When addressing questions of surveillance and technology, were there any particular books that you found informative or insightful?

Williams: Several. Two of my favorites were Testo-Junkie by Beatriz Preciado (read it and connect the dots) and A Theory of the Drone by Gregoire Chamayou. Aside from books there is, of course, a lot of amazing journalism taking place.

Carroll: How did your collaborative process with Sorne work for this book?

Williams: Working with Sorne has been a truly intuitive process. We met and bonded immediately. In fact, we thought we were bonding over music and poetry at our first meeting and by the end of the day he was already drawing.

Carroll: Has being involved in the creation of a graphic novel changed the way that you read comics?

Williams: Of course. But like the creative process in any medium, the deeper I go in, the more restrictive my diet becomes. Yet there’s a lot of great new work out there and I’m always dipping into comic shops and asking the weirdest worker I can find what I HAVE to read. I’m particulay interested in the growing number of women in the medium and am following the works of artists such as G, Willow Wilson, Valentine De Landro, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Jillian Tamaki…