Carlos Morales
If you’re no stranger to comics, you might know that Kieron Gillen is the writer of the hit series The Wicked + The Divine. Just in case you aren’t aware, he and Stephanie Hans have a new comic book that combines horror, fantasy, and gaming for all of us to discover.
DIE follows a group of six teenagers who vanish during a role-playing game session in 1991. They return out of the blue two years later, having been changed by their experience. Years later in 2018 as adults, they find that their haunting past might not be done with them yet.
Kieron and Hans previously worked together on Marvel’s Journey into Mystery, where Hans did the covers. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Gillen stated: “I just knew that the world clearly needed a fantasy universe drawn by Stephanie Hans, and would do anything to enable it”. After which, Hans expressed: “We have been talking about working on a book together for a while, and then realized that we were both waiting for the right moment to do some hardcore fantasy.”
In his Hollywood Reporter interview, Kieren was asked about the core elements of the book, to which he responded: “Fundamentally, it’s a book about a group of adults who realize their lives have not measured up to their teenage hopes, merged with a Planetary-esque examination of everything that fed into D&D (And how D&D took over the world’s conception of fantasy.) That’s pretty heavy, and necessary, and its timeliness adds to the sense that it really needs to be done”. Then he joked “Also, after five years on [The Wicked + The Divine], I had to write about people who were at least as old as I was.”
The new series is beautifully illustrated by Hans with a premise by Kieron that speaks to anyone, table-top gamer or not. Wrapping up his interview, Kieron made a two-word pitch: “Goth Jumanji, which cuts to the chase. More accurate would be Jumanji as Horror.”
