Review: Die

 Die is a comic book series divided into 4 volumes: Fantasy Heartbreaker, Split the Party, The Great Game and Bleed. It is a complete story arc and the volumes cannot be read out of order and do not stand alone.

The book starts great. The players are gathered for a birthday party, and the present is a free form Role Playing game with unique characters. Each player is given a die (hence the name of the series) that represents his or her character, and the game master names the player's class based on the player's descriptions. Then he declares that this is a special game where the game master is also one of the player and they're swept into the fantasy realm the game is in! A couple of years later, the players come back traumatized and without the game master. We then get the backstory of what happened, and of course, at a reunion the players are once again swept into the fantasy world.

There's at first a lot of the skewering of tropes in fantasy role playing games. For instance, one of the players kills a quest giver to avoid getting assigned a silly quest that they don't want to do. We get very nice exposure to what's a nicely created unique set of characters with very cool powers. Stephanie Hans does amazing art and the images are very beautiful. The author, Kieran Gillen then starts weaving into the narrative the history of war games, fantasy role playing, starring classic authors.

Unfortunately, by the middle of the third book we have a plot mess. We have meta gaming, a time travel conundrum, and overall, where everything is going and why the players had to be traumatized. I began to sense that the author had wrote himself into corner. Indeed, when I got to the ending, I found myself annoyed, as the conclusion made you think the entire thing was a waste of time (sic). There's a bootstrap paradox time loop that doesn't explain anything. There's a claim that the villain isn't an agent but is instead the concept of a role playing game despite the villain having been shown in the past to deliberately trap, manipulate, and traumatizes the players, and there's no real resolution of actual characters.

There's so much that could have been done with this concept (especially with an artist this talented drawing for you). But the ending felt like the author running away from conundrums and questions he himself created instead of tying everything up neatly. I'd say that it's worth reading the first two volumes and then pretending that the last two were never written. Just like I treat Battlestar Galactica as comprising of the mini series and the first 2 seasons and the first 4 episodes of the 3rd season and I pretend the rest of the series never happened.