Ben Ross Davis’ graphic novel reading list
Building the realm of his apocalyptic graphic novel 'Hexas.'
Before we present this week’s reading list, we’re sharing the results of n+1’s annual Bookmatch quiz. Make a donation of any amount to the magazine and get access to this very specific book quiz that makes you ponder things like whether the best way to die is “smeared across the event horizon” or “kidnapped by jealous gods for being too beautiful.” (Obviously the latter.) It ends TOMORROW so do it now :)
To give you a juicy little preview, here are Sophia’s top three:
The Water-Method Man by John Irving
Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused by Melissa Maerz (Editor’s note: LOL)
To Smithereens by Rosalyn Drexler
As well as Layla’s favorite two:
Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans
The Longview by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Hexas lives somewhere between prophecy and pattern, between the museum and the alleyway. It’s grayscale but emotionally technicolor — a comic about magic, technology, and the everyday ways we try to stay human.
Purchase Hexas online here or at Forbidden Planet or Desert Island in New York City. And catch Ben at Press Play, a weekend-long fair of books, records, art, ephemera, talks, and workshops, from December 13–14 at Pioneer Works.
When I started Hexas, I wanted to build a world that was built on my experiences in my 20’s living between Brooklyn and Berlin—futuristic, political and mystical, something that questioned what it means to be alive, an artist, and a citizen right now in the United States.
I wanted to reference aspects of my youth and pieces of media that really helped shape me as a young person. While Hexas is just the pilot volume and the story is left to be finished in future volumes, there are plenty of breadcrumbs for people to read further into.
It’s a comic born from frustration and fascination, from wanting to act in a world that keeps telling you to look away and accept the troubling news of the state of America right now. The influences below served less as reference points and more like frequencies, each one tuned the signal of the book.
The Invisibles by Grant Morrison
The inaugural cover of The Invisibles by Brian Bolland felt explosive when I first saw it and it still lives rent free in my head. The story itself was loud, cryptic, and conspiratorial — and yet it offered hope. Morrison’s whole project was about using story as a kind of magic, a way to reshape the world through imagination. That resonated deeply. Hexas came from that same impulse: to build a narrative that might, in some small way, show a way forward, or at least hold space for rebellion through beauty.
Memphis Milano: The New International Style
As a child of the ‘80s, I’ve always been drawn to pattern: the unapologetic clash of geometry and repetition. The Memphis movement fascinated me for its hybridity: an Italian design group referencing an ancient Egyptian city and a Tennessee one. That tension between the ancient and the synthetic feels close to what I’m trying to do in Hexas. The book’s grayscale world has its own patterns, its own language of texture and rhythm. A lot of the production time aside from the illustration was spent on making patterns specific to Hexas. I wanted it to feel simultaneously rooted in history, but digital, and existing in a hybridized environment.
New X-Men (E is for Extinction) by Grant Morrison
That run felt like a postmodern superhero fever dream. Frank Quitely’s line work and the quiet radicalism of showing the White Queen with a real human body left a permanent mark on me. It was a reminder that comics could be sensual, intellectual, funny and humane all at once — not escapist, but reflective.
7 Miles a Second by David Wojnarowicz & James Romberger
David’s work has been a north star since my early fine art years. His voice cracked open what art could be: raw, urgent, defiant. The fact that he translated that energy into a comic through Romberger’s art helped me imagine that I could do the same. You don’t have to stay in one medium; you can let them all talk to each other until something new emerges.
Uzumaki by Junji Ito
Manga shaped how I see pacing and tone. Ito’s spirals — both literal and psychological — taught me that grayscale can be limitless. You don’t need color to create movement; you need rhythm, contrast, and a pulse.
Bonus visual inspiration…
The Secret World of Alex Mack
If you grew up in the ‘90s, you might remember The Secret World of Alex Mack, the Nickelodeon series about a girl who could dissolve into liquid. That image stayed with me. In Hexas, liquid becomes metaphor — a medium for transformation, for slipping between worlds, identities, and timelines. It’s funny to trace something so central back to a show I watched as a kid, but that’s how influences work: the serious and the silly melt together.
Young Merlin for SNES
A reader once described Hexas as “MS Paint does neo-noir,” and I loved that. The 16-bit water animation in Young Merlin was hypnotic to me as a kid — a small pocket of wonder rendered in pixels. While the game isn’t the most entertaining, the way they did liquid I referenced in the illustration style of Hexas. I love watching how artists depict transparency and water in illustration and animation. I still think about it when I draw liquid forms: how to model something so natural, how to make something so alive synthetically. What aspects resonate the most in rain, a waterfall or liquid.
Buffy, Sabrina, and The Craft
Those shows gave me a language for friendship as magic. They taught me that a group of weird, devoted people can save the world with humor intact. That’s the spirit of Hexas: apocalypse and banter coexisting. If the world’s ending, we might as well make jokes on the way out.
Syd Mead, Party 2000, 1977, Courtesy Syd Mead Incorporated, Additional Frequencies
Syd Mead’s erotic futurism: chrome surfaces that gleam with longing and Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus dances: bodies turning into geometry and elements. Both seep into Hexas through posture, texture, and light. Everything becomes choreography; everything hums with possibility. After Hexas came out, a New York Times writer pointed me toward two early experiments in computer-generated comics: Batman: Digital Justice and Shatter. I hadn’t known about them when making the book, but they feel like kindred spirits in hindsight — early digital attempts to merge circuitry with story. Their inclusion here feels fitting.