It is great to have DIE: Loaded back in the game. Six issues in, the sequel to Stephanie Hans and Kieron Gillen’s so-called “Goth Jumanji” has consistently proven itself an excellent comic. Loaded’s first story arc, “Zero Sessions,” ended with a wallop of a turn. It was both surprising and made utter, terrible sense. DIE: Loaded #7, titled “Cosplay,” marks the start of “Git Gud,” the comic’s second arc. To make an admitted groaner of a joke, Hans and Gillen don’t need to git gud. They’ve been terrific since the first pages of DIE’s first volume. With that said, “Cosplay?” It’s gud. It’s very gud.
“Zero Sessions” followed a disparate group of folks pulled into DIE, a living game. DIE is shaped by and feeds on games and their players. To ensure steady nourishment, the game has ways of making itself real. In the 1990s, it did this by covertly guiding a creative teenager to develop a tabletop roleplaying game called DIE. When the gamemaker invited his friends to try it out for his birthday, they were pulled into DIE and spent years there. Not all of them made it home, and those who did came back scarred. In the 2010s, the players were pulled back into DIE again. Their journey had major consequences, bad and good alike, for all of them. Loaded’s players are the family of the first party: a spouse, parents, children.
Loaded’s party does not have the baggage that the original series’ party did with DIE. They have plenty of scars and foibles, but playing the game does not require them to tear open old wounds the way the first party had to. The trick is, there is another side to the coin. The first party were traumatized by DIE, but they knew what they were dealing with when they returned. Loaded’s party has a decent understanding of DIE, but knowing the rules isn’t the same thing as knowing how to play.
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In the core rulebook for the real life DIE RPG, Gillen writes that DIE “can be a serious game of personal trauma and loss…It can also be lighter, about real-world people dealing with the ludicrousness of a fantasy world. DIE can be a game about an adult finally coming to terms with their identity, and it can be about the nerdy teenager absolutely delighted by being able to throw fireballs. It can be all of the above.”
The disastrous conclusion of “Zero Sessions” was the result of one party member, the noxious teenage knucklehead Callum, deciding that his power fantasy was more important to him than his fellow players. He murdered three of the party, wrote “Play 2 Win” on the wall in their blood, and topped the whole thing off with a crude doodle of an erect penis. “Cosplay” follows the surviving party members, Sophie and Tommy, as they deal with the fallout of Callum’s betrayal.
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Visually, “Cosplay” sees Hans play with DIE: Loaded’s established visuals to fun effect. DIE is a world built on memory and pastiche. The familiar is refracted through the fantastic. During the first series, for instance, a teenager’s juvenile engagement with Tolkien’s wartime experiences resulted in a part of DIE turning into an endless World War I fought in part by Hobbits. “Cosplay” sees DIE’s inhabitants flip that script. They are fascinated by Earth and its culture. The everyday to a human is astounding to an elf, to the point that they’ll take the same care with cosplaying a Linux devotee that a human would cosplaying, say, Shadowheart.
On an immediate level, Hans’ depiction of an elf trying to fix a cosplay wig is specific and funny. In DIE: Loaded’s bigger picture, the cosplayers’ invocation of Earth heightens Hans’ more fantastic work. Thanks to the rules of DIE, Margaret, Molly, and Violet, the party members Callum murdered, have risen as undead Fallen. Hans twists her designs for the trio. Their clothes are sharper, their faces ragged and withered. They have become creatures dedicated to devourance, for only by slaying a living player can they return to life. DIE warps the world in a range of ways, from the more-or-less benevolent cosplay to the horrors of the Fallen. It’s wonderfully spooky work from Hans. Her command of DIE: Loaded’s more overtly fantastic elements is just as strong. Sophie’s gods are as striking as ever, vast creatures of immense power whose fixations shape their form and the ways they move through the world. A late-story dramatic arrival hits hard thanks to Hans’ deft combination of the visuals she’s used throughout the issue and the sheer paint-this-on-an-album-cover cool factor of what she’s illustrating. It’s a ball.
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Narratively, Gillen’s reintroduction of DIE: Loaded’s cast and their circumstances is fleet and swift. “Zero Sessions” was dedicated to introducing the new party, and pointedly contrasted them with their predecessors from DIE’s first volume. While “Git Gud” has yet to reveal its full structure, “Cosplay”’s interest in role playing, its pointed exploration of the way that Tommy’s character class works, and the Gary Gygax quote on the back cover (“If the time ever comes when . . . players agree on how the game should be played, D&D will have become staid and boring indeed.”) suggests that Gillen will be exploring one of the key points of difference between the old party and the new. The first party, for all their anguish and division, shared a broad consensus about how the game was played. The new party, even before Callum’s murderous twerpery turned everything sideways, has yet to lock in on how they will play. It’s an intriguing hook, especially given how Gillen is setting the stage to bring those contrasts into Die: Loaded’s foreground.
DIE: Loaded is a pleasure to read, a game whose every turn demands the reader turn to the next page. It’s a great comic.
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