DIE: Loaded #2: Art Imitates Art

The cat is officially out of the bag. Returning readers may have expected DIE: Loaded, the sequel to the 2018 hit comic series DIE, to see the original ensemble cast return to the world of Die once more. As the first issue of DIE: Loaded made clear, the protagonists of the new series will instead be the original series’ supporting characters. So far, this includes Dominic/Ash’s wife Sophie and Angela’s nonbinary child Molly. It remains to be seen what other characters will join the party as the series progresses. In the letters pages, writer Kieron Gillen notes that this change reflects a desire to explore the idea in DIE: Loaded that “no one is an NPC” (Non-Player Character). To what extent this approach will apply to the full-time denizens of Die remains to be seen. It is, unquestionably, an idea worthy of exploration, given how the far right, world’s richest man included, has co-opted the concept of “NPC” and applied it to real people over the last decade. 

As in the original series, our new protagonists must venture across Die, a world comprising twenty regions, mirroring a twenty-sided die used by Dungeons & Dragons and a multitude of other TTRPGs. As is true of the roleplay experience itself, Die’s geography has been transformed by the change in Game Masters and change in players. The original DIE was littered with literary cameos by initialed speculative fiction authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, and H.G. Wells. Thus far, DIE: Loaded has set its sights not on writing but the other half of comics—the thing without which a comic isn’t a comic at all: art. 

In this issue, Die is reframed not as primarily a world of story but a “realm of art.” On the plane where Sophie and Molly first arrive, they meet Die’s (French) goddess of art (a cheeky allusion to series artist Stephanie Hans?). While Hans’ DIE work is primarily digital, DIE: Loaded #2 draws attention to the comic’s created-ness and materiality. In the past, Hans has also worked in watercolor, usually for comic covers and convention commissions. As Sophie and Molly explore, background and foreground collapse in on one another in a haze of cotton-candy-colored, watercolor fog. While the textures of watercolour paper are present, as is the pooling of pigment at the edges of a dried water drop, it isn’t immediately evident if DIE: Loaded #2 is truly multimedia or if it is, in fact, a simulacrum of multimedia achieved with digital brushes and high-resolution paper textures. This uncertainty plays nicely with the comic’s deeper exploration of what art is, what art promises, and who gets to make art in the first place.