Die Loaded #1 by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans— The Bones Continue to Roll

Die Loaded #1 by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, Clayton Cowls, Rian Hughes, & Katie West (Image Comics, 2025)

The first time around with Die, Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans built in a back door to a sequel.  The story of a group of childhood friends who are sucked into a fantasy role-playing world explores everything from story to identity, not just once but twice in their lives. It ended in 2021 with the group returning to a world in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.  With Die, Gillen wrote a story that was equal parts fantasy novel and role-playing session while Hans sucked us into the world through artwork that belonged right next to any D&D guidebook cover.  Die Loaded #1 picks up shortly after Die ended, with the group re-adjusting to life as they gather to mourn one of their own who didn’t return from the fantasy world. 

This issue leads us into the next campaign, pulling a bit of a bait-and-switch along the way.  The first half of the issue could serve as an epilogue to the first series, as a few friends gather at a funeral for the one who didn’t make it back, revealing what they learned or the mistakes they’re willing to make again, leading up to everything happening yet again.  But that’s where Gillen and Hans zig when it looks like they were zagging as they pull two newish characters into the fantasy world, minor characters from the first half of the issue whose story Die Reloaded seems to really be about.  Both characters share interesting backstory similarities from the first series— they were the family left behind when the other disappeared in 2018.  When Ash, Angela, Chuck, Matt, and Izzy were pulled back into the fantasy world in Die #1, they left family behind, loved ones who were left to put their lives back together as husbands and mothers disappeared without a trace.  

As Gillen and Hans pull us back into this story, it feels both familiar and unknown, a neat trick for a sequel/continuation of a story that’s lingered out there since it ended.  There were elements from the first series that were left unanswered that Gillen and Hans didn’t need to return to.  Those unanswered questions were part of the characters’ journey in Die, mysteries from an unseen dungeon master to prod these men and women in certain directions and to make certain decisions.  This issue reminds us of those mysteries and makes us consider the consequences of the decisions made regarding them.  Die Loaded looks to be about those left behind, who didn’t have choices to make about what happened to them then.  They didn’t understand what happened to their husbands or mothers.  Even now when they gather for a funeral, those who didn’t experience the fantasy world don’t know what their loved ones did to survive and make it home.  

Die Loaded #1 brings all of the uncertainty in the world rushing back to us.  Seeing the characters from the first series, you can’t help but look at this brief glimpse back into their world without remembering all the betrayals, conflicts, and neglect they experienced and inflicted on each other.  These were people barely hanging onto their sanity as they were pulled into the world of a game.  And here we are back in that world, placed there firmly by Hans’ painted artwork that evokes every cheap (but great) fantasy novel you got lost in during your teen years.  There’s no mistaking this as a feel-good comic as Gillen and Hans seem invested in making us recall our darkest days as we see these characters about to face theirs.

And one of the mistakes this series seems set to remind us about is one of the tragic characters of the first series, a character who was already dead when we first encountered them.  (And not in the good, romantic already-dead sense but in the horrific walking dead kind of way.)  This character’s presence in the first series was one of those unanswered mysteries, the back door entrance into this sequel that offers up little hope for what this series is going to be.  There’s a story to be told here but there’s no hope for a happy ending.  It’s hard not to think that you know what this story is going to be if you’ve read the first series but maybe that’s where there’s room for something to happen and maybe that’s the story of Die and Die Loaded —just because it happened once (or maybe even twice,) it doesn’t need to happen again. And that’s why we keep reading.