A sequel to one of my favourite graphic novel series of possibly ever just launched, with a new first issue.
I was excited. I am excited! We are speaking, after all, of the graphic novels that I enjoyed so much that I did an entire, deep-dive review of the story as a whole. I enthusiastically described the series as a work deserving much wider recognition — even though its first, second and fourth volumes had all already earned Hugo Best Graphic Story Award nominations. (I stand by that! Celebrated yes, but not celebrated enough!)
So, I loved the story and all is right in the world now that I have more of it, right?
Well. Yes. Mostly! Kind of, maybe?
Let’s talk about DIE: Loaded #1! (Note: this review contains spoilers.)
DIE: Loaded #1
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: Stephanie Hans
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Designer: Rian Hughes
Editor: Katie West
Published by Image Comics
DIE returns for an epic new story of a dark fantasy adventure game gone horrifically right or wonderfully wrong. A year after their return from the hellish game world, the players gather for Chuck’s wake. They’ve finished with the game. The game isn’t finished with them. The three-time Hugo Award-nominated series is back in November. Get ready to roll initiative. Who’s going to DIE this time?
It’s a year after the Party finally escaped from the amoral god/world/game called Die — a year that they’ve mostly spent in lockdown thanks to COVID.
Now, finally able to gather, they come together to remember the one who didn’t make it home — not that they can tell anyone else why, after a collective agreement to not discuss their experiences.
And maybe it’s odd that opening hit me as hard as it did, but it did. Gillen and Hans adeptly put me right back into the pandemic. All of us, stuck in our homes. The sense of isolation. The funerals we couldn’t attend. The trauma we struggled to process.
And Ash has plenty of trauma, having missed the first year of their son’s life due to a terrible and unspeakably violent experience they can’t tell anyone else about. Now also they’re grappling with fatherhood and the recognition, thanks to both their sojourns in Die, that they’re definitely not cis. Matthew is doing better, his depression in abeyance, his family a source of strength. Angela is still a bit of a mess, navigating a fractious relationship with her daughter Molly. Izzy is somewhere else, working on a book of her own at long last. And Sol, the former Gamemaster, who trapped the others in Die, accidentally the first time, intentionally the second, only to realize that he was nothing more than another piece on the board to that amoral god…
He’s working on finally publishing his game.
The fault lines fracture at Chuck’s wake, and Ash leaves furious with Sol, convinced that he’s risking the lives of countless others who’ll be drawn into Die.
I must admit to being on the fence about exactly how much of a red herring this conflict with Sol is. For reasons that are about to become obvious, one of the former members of the Party is very clearly still deeply intertwined with Die. But it’s a little too pat, right? Sol was set up as the villain of DIE, only for us to learn that he was being used by the amoral god/world/game. Maybe he’s still being used. Maybe he just really loves his game and wants to share it with the world. Anyway, I have my suspicions about some other characters who’ve been working quietly in the background, not talking about their plans.
Regardless: Back home, Ash and Sophie open the final gifts Chuck left for them. There’s a moment of pure terror for Ash when he opens a small box that rattles, only to deflate with relief when he finds that it contains a miniature figure of his old character.
And Sophie’s gift? Sophie, Ash’s wife, the woman who single-mothered their son while Ash was away in another world, which he still hasn’t explained to her?
Her gift is a polyhedral die.
And she vanishes. Stolen, Ash knows, by Die.
We pivot, to Sophie’s perspective, as she arrives in Die and is immediately confronted with mortal peril from the Fallen — the mindless warrior drones of Die that are made from people from our world who’ve died in the game. And Sophie’s also hearing voices in her head, the voices of one woman, and a whole bunch of gods. Gods offering to make deals.
Faced with the opportunity to be connected with other members of her Party, she asks to be taken to the one that’ll put her least in hock to the bear god she chose, the closest — and finds Molly, Angela’s daughter.
There’s a whole bunch here that’s a lot clearer to the reader than it is to Sophie; we know that she’s just been made a Godbinder, Die’s rough equivalent of a D&D cleric, who functions by making pacts and bargains with the gods. We know, as she only sort of starts to understand, that she’s running up a bill for divine services rendered that is definitely going to come due.
Even more importantly, we know that time works differently in Die, and that Ash, Angela, Izzy and Chuck encountered Molly in Die before. A Molly from their future. And she was dead, risen as a Fallen before they ever saw her.
Molly, Angela’s daughter, Ash’s niece, whom Sophie just made a promise to protect with her life, is doomed to die.
That’s the freaking cliffhanger. If you’re invested at all in the characters, as I am? Holy smokes!
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.
The characters are vividly defined, and continue to pop right off the page, even those we only see briefly.
And that twist? Look, I knew that the plot had to involve a return to Die. That was obvious. But the idea that it would be the Party’s loved ones, people who might be entirely unfamiliar with TTRPGs? I must admit I didn’t see that coming. It was a nice bit of bait and switch.
Stephanie Hans’ art is, if anything, better than the previous iteration of DIE. It was already excellent, so this is a matter of increments, but the way characters are able to emote so clearly and evocatively, even when highly stylized is remarkable. A strength of Hans’ remains depicting the chaos and confusion of action scenes, without that action actually being confusing or hard to follow.
So, it’s all great? Yes, definitely. And yet… I’m just a bit underwhelmed?
This is, once again, a me problem. This was my first time reading DIE in a single-issue and electronic format. I couldn’t make it to a comic shop the week the issue dropped, and wanted to make sure I got it (which goes to an entirely different problem with the comics industry that need not be unpacked just now). But the point is, before this, I read DIE in print, in collected volumes compiling five issues each, and essays from Gillen in the backmatter. I could set aside some time, and really read.
We’re once again, here, facing the problem of the single, periodical issue of a comic — a ‘floppy’ is slightly mean nickname — and how it and its value stand up as a single unit of story.
But I can read 32 pages of comics in a handful of minutes, even a comparatively narratively dense one like this. It’s just not a great trade-off.
I’m very much looking forward to seeing where this story goes, but I think for the sake of my enjoyment of the series, I’d better wait for the first collected volume, DIE: Loaded – Zero Sessions. It’s due out at the start of June. Now that? That’ll be a satisfying unit of story.
My recommendation? If you don’t mind a great story told in brief installments, then by all means read DIE: Loaded that way. If you’re like me and want to settle into a graphic novel, maybe join me in holding off, just for now.
Disclosures: I have no personal or professional relationships with the creators or publisher. I purchased my own copy of the comic for review.
