Silver Sprocket: I. Rotman, J Woodall, Io/Dukes/Warner/Fisher

No Gods, No Dungeon Masters, by Io, Rachel Dukes, Andy Warner & Hannah Fisher. Published by Avi Ehrlich, Silver Sprocket has become a publisher at the intersection of punk culture and geek culture. After years of releasing punk records, Ehrlich slowly made the transition to comics, and their most recent line of comics has cemented this. This mini was reprinted from the Subcultures anthology published a couple of years back, polished up a bit and recolored. The story is very much about a genderqueer person deeply steeped in RPG and geek culture who also identifies as an anarchist and part of punk culture. The story involves them going from a D&D session to helping thwart a police crackdown on a squat ("he just started screaming 'cast magic missile' and throwing bottles"), wondering why this cultural intersection didn't seem as natural to others as it did to them. Dukes was a perfect artist to portray this, as a queer person also deeply rooted in geek culture and punk politics. As such, there's a cheery, bright quality to this comic that carries over into the more political aspects of the story, since they are folded into the main character's fantasy life anywya

Girls, by Jenn Woodall. One of the big questions frequently asked by Silver Sprocket is why women (cis and trans), genderqueer folk and people of color aren't more readily accepted in punk/anarchist communities. Ben Passmore's brilliant Your Black Friend takes down the racial aspects of this in a measured, funny and angry way (he richly deserved his Eisner nomination) and Woodall's Girls, a collection of mostly silent images that scream more than a thousand words each, handles sexism. Often, quite literally with a baseball bat. It's a spiritual twin of Hellen Jo's Frontier #2, only with a different kind of aesthetic and purpose. Above all else, this is a comic about agency actively and forcefully expressing themselves in the world  in a variety of ways, from a variety of perspectives and aesthetics. From the young woman vomiting flowers to the weary astronaut on a moon orbiting Saturn, this is one long howl against discrimination, objectification, rape culture, violence against women and the patriarchy in general. It's also very much an affirmative display of women, not just a reaction. Woodall is a talented illustrator who manages to combine fantastical elements with an expressive naturalism. Every woman is vividly brought to life on their own terms, and Woodall emphasizes that despite a common desire to resist and struggle, the ways in which they do that differ for everyone here. There's also a sense of joy to be found in the righteous anger expressed in this comic, as it's a part of claiming that agency.

Siren School, by Isabella Rotman. This is a perfectly executed series of jokes about mansplaining. Rotman takes the sirens of myth and conceptualizes them having to learn modern techniques on how to lure men, as simply sitting on a rock and looking beautiful doesn't cut it anymore. Instead, each of the sirens develops a patter that flatters and encourages men to mansplain to them about cars, video games, Star Wars, fantasy sports and especially allowing men to think that the sirens don't recognize their own beauty and that only men can bring it out of them. The siren wearing glasses and saying that she plays video games, but not real video games, is a hilarious stab at the heart of the heinous "gamer gate" controversy and the whole "fake geek girl" nonsense that is so prevalent in pop culture. Each page is a single panel that continues to build until the inevitable: a siren showing her teeth, getting ready to reel in her prey. The concept of sirens playing to men's fantasies in an entirely different but modern way is a hilarious one, only Rotman tells the story not so much to emphasize the ways men are weak, but rather the way that their egos blind them to reality as they treat women like the weak-willed and ill-informed objects that the sirens pretend to be. It's smart, funny and just the right length at 22 pages.

Minis: L.Luna/P.Wishbow, H.Fisher, R.Jordan

Cosmoknights, by Hannah Fisher. This is a great example of how younger creators have completely eradicated the boundaries between genre comics and alternative comics. This is a slice-of-life comic that slowly reveals its more fantastical details about two young women from very different societal castes who develop an intense friendship. Tara, as we learn, is royalty. Pan, her best friend, lives a more hardscrabble existence but is in many ways her friend's connection to the outside world. This comic is all about moments and the ways in which the two characters relate to each other, and as such, it's heavy on body language cues. Fisher has a strong sense of line but an even stronger sense of how to use color as the key element of her emotional narrative. There's one sequence where the friends are at a nighttime, outdoors concert where the blacks, purples and blues provide an emotional backdrop for the friends dancing, and then later Pan shows Tara a spectacular view of the two moons of her planet. (This is when it becomes explicit that this is a science-fiction story.)

When Pan helps her friend escape from how prescribed her fate is about to become, she does it knowing that she will be arrested and will be separated from her friend no matter what. As the back cover notes, a knight can be "the devoted champion of a lady", and that's precisely the role Pan plays for Tara in this first installment of a much longer story. Fisher is able to make this comic a complete story in and of itself, with a fully realized emotional arc. Obviously, there's a longer narrative arc in the offing, but it's clear that the series' emotional arc is its most important component.

Give, by Pam Wishbow/Hunt, by Leigh Luna. This is the last release of the sadly departed Yeti Press, but it's a good one, spotlighting two up-and-coming cartoonists. Wishbow's creepy comic about plumbing the mysteries of the forest uses a sickly green as a spot color as the story's narrator tries to resurrect a dead mouse using various herbs and ephemera she finds in the forest. When she's eventually successful, she learns that getting what she wanted wasn't necessarily what was good for her, as the forest gave and then took it away. Wishbow's art is dynamic and abstracted in the way children's illustrations sometimes are, popping off the page with powerful, stylized compositions. The way Wishbow incorporated text into the art itself made the comic more immersive, creating a world that the reader is drawn into.

Luna's story juxtaposes multiple bright colors against a pitch-black story, as tradition dictates that the mothers of a small town must put their daughters out into the woods with the wolves for a night. Tellingly, there is no reason given as to why the women allow this: it simply happens, because the wolves take them. The most the women can do is prepare them, fixing their hair and putting them in beautiful dresses as a kind of "preparation" that is not actually a safeguard of any kind. The comic is a brutal condemnation of rape culture without once using the word, with the ending featuring the women taking the sons of the wolves to "teach them to be good". The comic goes from a multigenerational commiseration of helplessness and inevitability to a seizing of power and agency. There's a delicacy throughout the comic in terms of the figurework and use of color, and that doesn't change even at the end.

Duane's Big Walk, by Rusty Jordan. This is a kind of catch-all zine for some of Jordan's recent short stories involving his Duane character. Jordan's trademark is exploring various contrasts with blacks and shades of gray, with Duane musing existentially with his bird friend Christian. There's a bizarre puppet/claymation story featuring a TV newswoman whose story starts to hilariously and disturbingly unravel as the comic proceeds. The worlds that Jordan creates are evocative and strange, full of losers, bottom-feeders, hard-travelers and the desperate. "Off The Schneid!" puts them all together in a single story and lets them all intermingle. A lost romance is rekindled. A friendship is repaired. A bar is the setting for all of this, as all of these desperate people become a community of sorts. There is warmth to be found in Jordan's world, even if it's covered up by grime and toil. It's reflected in his grotesque but friendly character design, all lumps and bulging eyes and tufts of hair out of place. These characters are familiar, like on the edge of one's social circle from years ago. There's a lingering sense of absurdity in Jordan's comics and a touch of sadness combined with an unformed but still present sense of hope.