'Comics Is Such a Jealous Medium': Rolling DIE: Loaded With Kieron Gillen, Part 1
In 2021, Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans wrapped their run on the deconstructionist fantasy comic DIE. Four years later, they're back with the sequel, DIE: Loaded. Gillen explains the series' philosophy and what sets it apart from the original.
I was a little bit surprised to find myself talking to writer Kieron Gillen about DIE: Loaded, the sequel to his and artist Stephanie Hans' critically acclaimed comics series DIE, and that was only partly because I wasn't sure that he'd agree to sit for an interview with an outlet that didn't technically exist yet.
Mostly, it was because I had been convinced there wouldn't be any more DIE. Over the course of 20 issues released from 2019-2021, Gillen and Hans had told a story that felt pretty complete, and I didn't recall hearing any talk about a possible continuation during its original serialization.
That my copy of the DIE deluxe hardcover edition, which collects all 20 of those original issues, had Book One printed clearly and prominently on its spine did nothing to dissuade me of this notion. Speaking over video call from his home in the U.K., Gillen makes me feel slightly better about the whole thing by shedding light on a second meaning besides the obvious one.
"We put 'Book One' on the side of it, and it's just future-proofing," Gillen tells me, "in that, if we choose to do a sequel, it's going to look stupid if we don't have 'Book One' on Book One, you know?
"There's also the slightly meta reason," he continues, "as in [it's] Book One, and all the things about DIE RPG and all the stories in DIE RPG that you play, and the ones that you make up are canon due to the nature of DIE itself. So it was Book One, and then everyone else's RPGs are Books Two to X million."
Welcome to DIE
The original DIE follows a group of six people, what you might call a "party" (they gathered for a literal birthday party), who were sucked into a game world Jumanji-style when they were teenagers. Except instead of finding themselves in a safari-themed board game, these players are drawn into the setting for a tabletop RPG designed by a teenager, who has spent practically their entire life up until that point doing little other than studying the form, function, and history of tabletop RPGs.
After a trying adventure, the party managed to escape, minus one member who was left behind in the game world (Sol, the teenage game designer) – their fate unknown, but presumed dead. The rest of the party, bearing their various scars, both psychological and physical, returned to their lives and grew up.
If you haven't read DIE and are wondering why I just spoiled it entirely for you, don't worry, I didn't. All of that is covered in the first few pages of the series' debut issue. DIE's plot begins in earnest 30 years after those events, as the five surviving, now-adult players are sucked back into the game world they struggled so hard to escape, forced to make more sacrifices, accrue more scars, and face the repercussions of certain choices they made decades ago if they ever hope to return home once more.
Gillen became so invested in DIE's game world that he eventually turned it into an actual RPG, called, appropriately, DIE RPG. Having established that DIE itself is sentient and outside of time, any real-world party's adventure played using DIE RPG is canon to DIE, and part of the game's attempts to a certain the purpose of its own existence (a more sci-fi version of this might be an AI that has become sentient and is running countless simulations in search of existential meaning), hence the "X million" stories Gillen mentioned above.
"Right at the beginning, my core idea of DIE, even before talking to Stephanie, was... this is a fantasy device to examine what games and people do when they intersect," Gillen explains. "So with DIE, whilst it exists to tell a very specific story, I always knew, right from the off, that this was a device I would like to return to as long as I have stuff I'd like to say. The fact that it appears to be a completely closed story is because we're good at our jobs."
"Comics is such a jealous medium."
And Gillen does have more he'd like to say, as it turns out. He and Hans are back with their own new entry into DIE's canon, the sequel series DIE: Loaded, which picks up one year after the conclusion of the original DIE. Gillen says that, while DIE is self-contained, readers can go back and see the moment where DIE: Loaded, as a concept, was born.
