So yes, my expectations were thrown by the book seeming to be a Buddy Comedy. […] It took me time to realize that Cope was aiming for something else. Something more like if Leiber wrote the Gray Mouser as a vicious little girl and Fafhrd as an uptight and possibly racist wizard, and they really, really didn’t like each other.
Hugo season is well underway—voting closes on August 8th—and as usual, I’m fascinated by the range of works that landed on the ballot for Best Graphic Story this year. It’s a diverse list—superheroes, cats, children, wizards, the living and the dead and those not entirely on either side of that question. A new take on a character who’s been published for decades, an installment of a webcomic that’s been running for twenty years, variations on a theme of deconstruction, an adaptation of a classic novel, and a brand-new tale about something as old as humanity—grief.
I like thinking of awards as signposts, and I value the guidance they provide. I particularly value the Lambda Literary Award Best LGBTQI+ Comics category, because it’s a great opportunity to read and celebrate works by queer creators from a broad and diverse range of genres.
This is another example — it seems to be a bit of a theme this year! — of a graphic novel that pushes at the form to encourage readers to engage with the work. As such, it may not be for everyone, but it’s definitely for me.
If it wasn’t clear by now, in addition to being very good comics, this is very good science fiction. There are many ways to approach science fiction in the comics form, but this might be the most genuinely speculative, the most deeply considered and textured, the most well-thought-out future history of any comic I’ve read since my old friend Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder – and Finder was one of my favorite comics of all time. There are no SFFnal elements that feel extraneous, tacked-on, or like they’re there just for Rule of Cool.
This first issue of DIE: Loaded is well-paced, setting up events deftly, and it’s full of hooks (and, no doubt, foreshadowing that will pay off down the line). Some of it you certainly have to have read the previous series to fully appreciate, but not all I would guess, and as a die-hard DIE-hard, I certainly wasn’t bothered by the callbacks.
