forever in progress

Roll on Death

Die #1 is perhaps the best first issue I've read since returning to monthly comics last year. This is surprising for two reasons: one, Die wasn't on my radar at all; my wife bought it, drawn by Stephanie Hans' striking cover art. Two, I'd previously read writer Kieron Gillen's The Wicked + The Divine and found it... okay? I didn't dislike it, but I scarcely remember it and wasn't moved to continue reading.

Die*, on the other hand, had my full attention by its fourth page. Certainly it helps that the book is about tabletop role-playing, a hobbyhorse of mine (though weirdly I've never played), but I was struck by gamemaster Solomon's description of the bespoke game he'd created to celebrate his birthday. “It's not some piece of D&D off-the-shelf shit in a box,” he tells his doubtful friends who've come, possibly to celebrate with Sol, possibly because it's 1991, they're sixteen years old, and they have nothing better to do. Sol's game isn't a “dungeon bash” or “rooms of orc genocide bullshit.” He promises instead “Thomas Covenant ... RPG-Watchmen.” “Hell,” he says, “this is Gormenghast,” immodestly placing his new game alongside the cult-favorite fantasy by Mervyn Peake. He puts the sale on, hard, and his friends buy in.

Each player rolls a character, and these roles are described in an ingenious layout that slashes diagonal panels across two pages. In each panel one of Sol's friends describes his or her attributes and receives in turn a name and a die. Isabelle, for example, is “some kind of atheist with gods for pets.” Godbinder, Sol dubs her. What happens next won't surprise fans of the 1980s D&D cartoon, Die's unlikely inspiration, but Gillen has more than Narnia in mind. For one thing, the story leaps forward by 27 years in the span of just three pages. For another, Sol's friends, now middle-aged, are marked by more than the all-too-ordinary tragedies of adulthood. Each friend — and Dominic, the protagonist, in particular — is haunted by a trauma that he or she literally cannot name. All of this — the compression of time, the mystery of the missing (where has Sol gone?) — makes for compelling reading, as does the book's unspoken promise that, in time, readers will see exactly what it means to play the role of the Dictator, the Grief Knight, or Godbinder.

Gillen also captures something of the titular die's strangeness, its mythic and magical qualities. For one thing, the faces of a d20 unfold on the back cover, making a angular rune-like diagram, which appears also on the cover. What might this sharp-edged shape portend? For another, dice have long been thought to influence fate, and for the characters of Die there's no separation between life and the game. The wrong roll could spell death, as the title's double entendre ominously suggests. And in that lack of separation, the collapse of boundaries between role- and real-playing, lies a dread of overindulgence, of losing oneself in make-believe. The book's epigraph, a Tolkien quotation, suggests as much:

“I am not at all sure that the tendency to treat this whole thing as a kind of vast game is really good—certainly not for me, who finds that kind of thing only too fatally attractive.”

** Confusingly, Image Comics is publishing Die and Die Die Die concurrently. So don't get carried away adding Die to your pull list or you might get something else instead.

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