Agent Jesse Lee (alias Kestrel) is Inspired; afflicted with a condition that gives you the power to build wonderful, impossible things. Things regular people would see as pure madness… if they didn’t work. But the cost is your own sanity – Inspiration is all-consuming, and it’s permanent. Lee’s found a unique way of dealing with it. He was recruited to a deep-state government agency, where along with his partner (or, debatably, handler), senior agent Bruce Altmann, they track down and neutralize any of the doomsday devices, temporal anomalies, Elvis re-animation schemes, or what-have-yous posing this week’s threat to national security.

For two years, things have been great. But when a routine mission goes south, and Lee’s ‘condition’ starts to visibly, dangerously, deteriorate, the agency separates the pair indefinitely, forcing each to reckon with their role in the other’s life. And in the meantime, the most dangerous devices and schemes they’ve been tracking have started to vanish without a trace – and no one seems to know why.

Tailslide is a (free, ongoing) sci-fi action-adventure comic about identity, responsibility, and maybe getting fired from your top secret government job! It features, among other things:

  • a ton of queer characters
  • mad science shenanigans
  • complicated quasi-parental relationships
  • political intrigue
  • ill-advised romantic tension
  • some really poor life coaching
  • and plenty of existential angst over how to save the world, when no one can agree on what’s worth saving

It’s set loosely in the world of the Genius: The Transgression tabletop game written by Kyle Marquis. Several characters and plot points began their lives in the wonderful Future of Tomorrow! LARP written and run by members of the MIT Assassin’s Guild in January 2019. You don’t have to have read either of these things to enjoy the comic – but if you do enjoy this comic, you’d almost certainly enjoy them too.

The author, cAPSLOCK (R. Skye Thompson), is a cartoonist and roboticist and PhD student, which probably explains a lot. You can find more of his art at pen-caps.tumblr.com, or on twitter @cruiserctrl.