One of the great pleasures of Stephanie Hans and Kieron Gillen’s horror fantasy comic DIE is their comfort with discomfort. The original series, which followed a group of estranged friends trapped in the world of a home-brewed tabletop role-playing game that they’d only barely escape as teenagers, regularly featured impressively thorny character work. Take, for instance, Ash, the character with perhaps the strongest claim to being the book’s overall protagonist. Throughout DIE, Ash struggled with their predilection for cruelty and manipulation, as well as with their tendency to see the worst parts of themself as the truest parts of themself. With DIE: Loaded, Hans and Gillen preserve the series’ thought-provoking, uneasy character craft and expand on it by inverting the rules that govern their characters.
The first volume of DIE saw its protagonists struggle against a game system that they knew was encouraging them to embrace maladaptive behaviors. Ash and their fellow party members, for all their struggles, understood the ways that role-playing games (and by extension the world of DIE) worked and how they approached them as players. Moreover, they had played together before, and understood (if imperfectly) how each of them played. DIE: Loaded‘s burgeoning party, meanwhile, have found themselves trapped in a world whose mechanics they mostly sort of understand, and while they are not strangers, so far they are closer to acquaintances. They do not have the same baggage or pre-existing bad patterns to fall into that the first party did, and at the same time they’re a pack of wildcards flying blind through a world they barely understand.
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Visually, Hans is using the framework she and Gillen built during the first series to transform the familiar, like the living embodiment of DIE the game/world, and create space for the new. Issue #3 sees Sophie, who so far is shaping up as Loaded‘s most frequent narrator and protagonist in the same way her husband Ash was in DIE, meet a new member of her would-be adventuring party. The new player, a returning character from the first volume who takes a major leap in character depth and importance, is a Dictator, the character class that Ash did during their runs through the game. To quote the official manual for DIE (the real-world role-playing game system Hans and Gillen built alongside the comic, hereafer DIE RPG for clarity’s sake), “Dictators play people like a musician plays a harp. They can pluck the strings. They can snap them. They’re like bards, if everyone was fucking petrified of bards.”
Ash’s garb as a Dictator was long and flowing, and featured a spectacular collar. As Hans drew them, they radiated power unleashed. The new Dictator’s aesthetic retains the flowing robes and red gem that Ash wore, but their look is distinct from Ash’s. It’s tidier and more elegant, which, coupled with the character’s reserved body language, creates the impression of the new Dictator being someone who believes that she’s holding her enormous power in check. Ash using their power feels like a wave. The new Dictator’s power feels like a bomb. It’s marvelous work on Hans’ part, and it bodes well for the visual identities of the rest of the party
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Scriptwise, Loaded #3 demonstrates Gillen’s reliable skill with character craft with his swift expansion of the new Dictator’s characterization. In the issue’s back matter, Gillen notes that spending time in her head “wasn’t fun.” It isn’t. She’s a deeply unhappy, self-loathing woman whose experiences mesh well with her newfound powers in the sense that someone with her experiences is not someone who will do no harm with the ability to control and manipulate others as she sees fit. Her hurt, her self-awareness, her poise, her unbridled fury and her need for an impossible closure read as genuine, and her potential arc is both intriguing and unsettling.
On a macro scale, one of the most interesting inversions between DIE and DIE: Loaded is the balance of knowledge. DIE‘s first party knows the game world better than a first-time reader would, while a reader continuing from DIE to Loaded knows the game world better than the new party does. This creates space for surprises, as happened in Loaded‘s first issue with the introduction of the new party, and it also generates tension. Most of the new party are more together than the first party were on their first trip to DIE the world, but the first party were also literally teenagers at the time. Moreover, the first party had the advantage of foreknowledge during their second trip to DIE the world. None of them had an easy time facing their demons, but they at least had the context to recognize the ways that the character classes and powers could bring out their worst selves. Sophie and her party aren’t fools (they haven’t even recruited their Fool yet), but they have blind spots in their knowledge that could easily lead them to put themselves through the ringer with good intentions.
DIE: Loaded #3 is a very fun comic. Not in the sense that the new Dictator is sunlight and rainbows, but in the specificity of Hans’ body language and colors, in Gillen’s emerging picture of the party and how they’ll face DIE and themselves. It has hooks, and they catch. I’m excited for issue #4, for the party’s continuing expansion, for Hans’ gods, heroes and monsters, for Gillen’s character craft and wordplay.
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