I first came across the work of Samuel Benson when, in fairness, he came across me and sent me a copy of his impressively strange full-length comic A Different Sky, a post-psychedelic exploration of altered consciousness, sci-fi high weirdness, and quasi-magical birds from a stoner/slacker perspective that struck a cord with its idiosyncratic dialogue, bizarre-yet-logically-consistent plotting, and just plain intense art, a combination of belabored cross-hatching, big eyes, nervous faces, and gritty urban rendering. It was quite unlike anything else in recent memory, but as it turns out that’s only because my “sample size” of Benson’s own work was pretty small.

In truth, unbeknownst to me until very recently, Benson has been self-publishing a magazine-formatted series called Long Gone Comix, the third issue of which just recently came out, and tonally and stylistically and artistically it serves up much the same kind of “far-out” cartooning A Different Sky