Prepare yourself for the unholy fusion of "Taxi Driver" and "Ed Wood"...
Prepare yourself for the story of an unlikely friendship between a Z-grade film and Off-Off-Off Broadway auteur with some serious sadistic tendencies and his best friend, an aspiring actor who would become the United States' most wanted domestic extremist...
Prepare yourself for Andy Milligan and Dennis Malvasi, a bond forged in entertainment that proves art is never innocent...
Dennis Malvasi returned from Vietnam desperate to forget the war and found his calling before the camera and on the stage. Andy Milligan grew up gay and angry in deep flyover country and found his rightful home in New York's underground world of avant-garde theater and 42nd Street exploitation flicks.
But as the 1970s morphed into the 1980s and subversive art became an endangered species, Andy and Dennis weren't able to get with the times, and each responded badly. Milligan took his work up several notches to the point it resembled aesthetic terrorism against the audience and Dennis turned to actual terrorism, becoming a solider for an obscure Christian cult dedicated to stamping out abortion by any means necessary.
And although Dennis and Andy's tale is embalmed in the lurid amber of a New York of long ago, their story prefigures and mirrors the America of today, more than even they could have imagined...
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all illustrations copyright (c) Banjamin Marra, 2023
Nicholas Mennuti is the writer of the espionage thriller Weaponized (Mulholland Books/Little Brown), which had film rights purchased by Universal Pictures and Scott Stuber and Scrap (NeoText). Nicholas's short stories have appeared in AGNI and Conjunctions, and he has written about the intersection of technology and entertainment for the Huffington Post. He is also a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts Dramatic Writing program.
Benjamin Marra is the creator, writer, and artist of the comics NIGHT BUSINESS, AMERICAN BLOOD, and TERROR ASSAULTER: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror), all published by Fantagraphics. Acclaimed writer Grant Morrison chose Marra as a collaborator on the first issue of the relaunched HEAVY METAL Magazine. Marra had two serialized webcomic series appear on adultswim.com. His most recent book is JESUSFREAK, written by Joe Casey and published by Image Comics. In 2016, he was named one of the Art Directors Club's Young Guns. He illustrated the cover of American Illustration 35. In 2017, he was nominated for a Grammy Award for his album art of Wayfaring Strangers: Acid Nightmare, a collection of obscure 1970s post-Age-of-Aquarius Heavy Metal.
