Quite a bit ago, I took a look at Golden Rage, a comic that asked what would happen if society dumped all of the women they deemed no longer useful to the world on a small, remote island. What ended up happening was tribalism and a series of violent acts every time a new boat of women appeared on the island. Another thing that happened was that women who weren’t able to bear children were also being sent to the island. But then what did Chrissy Williams, Lauren Knight, Sofie Dodgson, Shayne Hannah Cui, and Becca Carey do after that first issue?

The last time we saw Jay, she had been dumped onto the island filled with old women and was preparing to fight for her life. Only the fight they thought was coming to the lighthouse of Rosie, Lottie, and Caroline was a warning from a friend—one of the Red Hat Gang that’s been perpetuating most of the violence on the island. What follows from there is Jay and her friends traveling the island to get away from the Gang before being confronted with their new leader: Regina, another woman much too young to have been sent to the island. But what follows from here is not what we expect. In a traditional Battle Royale, we’d see a gathering of forces and lines being drawn in the island before the inevitable bloodbath. Instead, we learn about what will happen to the island—that people are coming from the mainland to “clean up” whoever is left there. And so we have a coming together, a preparing of defenses island-wide to ensure that they’re all able to survive.

Golden Rage exists to subvert. We’re given a setting where people are trapped on an island so there inevitably has to be violence and territorial disputes. But then these are older women, women who had retired or had only really lived in domestic situations—that isn’t to say there wasn’t some measure of violence, but it wasn’t the norm. Until someone younger came in to disrupt things, causing a new band of older women to run havoc over the island and leaving knitting needles in bodies as a warning. And it’s not until another younger person comes to the island that this gang is dethroned as a leading force of violence on the island. The women already there aren’t doting old fools, they know what violence would mean to them and had done what they could to avoid it. While the island may have looked like a Battle Royale from the outside, the inside ended up much more tame.

Golden Rage is a comic you think is going to be a bombastic series about grannies fighting over a scrap of land and piles of Golden Girls references. While we do get some of the latter, the former was never really the point. This isn’t a comedy of bloodshed, but an intricate look at how we feel about women aging and growing old. We see their youth for as long as it’s there, but after that, we’d prefer to push them out to sea. And even after that, they can still find time for tea together. 

Get excited. Get knitting.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.