The small publisher Silver Sprocket is reaching out to the comics community for help after losing its basement storage space to the flooding that hit the Bay Area on New Year’s Eve. Silver Sprocket has its own store and keeps stock in the basement, but that storage area has suffered heavy water damage, according to an e-mail sent out by the publisher.

“The great news is how incredibly our community showed up with dozens of people arriving less than an hour after our call for help to carry tons of indie comics upstairs away from the floodwaters,” the publisher said. “The bummer is that we still can’t use the wet basement, have to replace nearly all of the lower level furniture and fixtures, and the back portion of the shop is an unruly pile of rescued boxes.” This has restricted access to the store for shoppers and is slowing down fulfillment of mail orders, leading to a loss of revenues.

Silver Sprocket is asking the public to help by pre-ordering upcoming books, buying digital downloads, or making a direct donation via a special page on their website.

Silver Sprocket is a San Francisco-based comics publisher that is distributed by both Diamond and Lunar. Upcoming titles include Golden Record by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, the artist for the triple Eisner Award winning graphic novel Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me; Rituals, by Nicole Goux (Shadow of the Batgirl, Forest Hills Bootleg Society); and the second edition of the benefit anthology Comics for Choice. They published Ben Passmore’s Eisner Award-winning Sports Is Hell, and Silver Sprocket titles won five Ignatz Awards at SPX 2022. Silver Sprocket put out its first Free Comic Book Day comic in 2021, although the mature-rated comic was inadvertently handed to children at one library (see “Library Apologizes After Child Gets Adult Comic on Free Comic Book Day”).