A Punk and Queer Immigrant Lens on Rider Waite Smith

Next World Tarot is a seventy eight card independent deck written and illustrated by cartoonist Cristy C. Road, published by Silver Sprocket in 2018. It is modelled on the Rider Waite Smith tarot's standard structure of twenty two Major Arcana and fifty six Minor Arcana cards, reworked through a queer, punk and immigrant lens that replaces the historical deck's classical figures and settings with contemporary characters drawn from Road's own community and visual world, rendered in a bold, high contrast punk zine illustration style she drew by hand.

Its guidebook meanings are the deck's own, adapted from Rider Waite Smith divinatory structure to fit its contemporary themes rather than reproducing the earlier deck's interpretations unchanged. That approach, keeping an existing deck's card count and structural framework while writing new meanings suited to a specific contemporary lens, sets Next World Tarot apart from Modern Witch Tarot's closer scene by scene adherence to Rider Waite Smith's original compositions, and places it nearer to Deviant Moon Tarot and The Urban Tarot among the catalogue's independently produced decks that use the traditional structure as a scaffold for an entirely new visual and thematic world.