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Lady Ash

Stephanie Hans

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“Free.” I’m Suspicious of the Word

Die #9 Written by Kieron Gillen Art by Stephanie Hans Special Guest Colour Artist Elvire De Cock (P8-19) Lettered by Clayton Cowles

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Persephone from The Wicked + The Divine.  (This was a pre-show commission for ECCC 2019!)

[Aud Koch} :::  Twitter / Instagram / Portfolio / Facebook

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she smiles!!!!!

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Each time a new issue of DIE comes out, I find myself closing the issue on a swell of feeling and thinking "this is my favorite". In truth they all are when I read them, but I must say that the fourth issue answered a particular desire of mine - to learn more about the characters as people processing the traumas that first brought them together (deaths), the traumas they inflicted upon one another in the process (messy relationships), the traumas they share from having been forced into the game twice. Oh, did this issue deliver! Gillen and Hans do extraordinary character work, I think. A great part of me wants to go back and devour the issue again, then write out all the things it made me think and feel, but the dissertation must be finished this month, so I shall have to refrain and wait until April, and be content with expressing delight.

Before logging off, I shall note excitement over a detail that confirms something I wasn't sure about - Angela's D10 does indeed appear to be located in the wrist of her mechanical arm.

DIE #4, by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, Clayton Cowles ...

So Angela's is in the hand, Ash's is in her chest over her heart, Izzy's in her head-dress, Chuck's dangles from his ear, Matt's powers his sword in response to emotion, and Sol's are in his eyes. Logical, but compelling as an underlying structure that both reveals and conceals who these people are as players and characters.

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tolkien: all the war and death in lotr has nothing to do with the war i was in

tolkien: just like how all the morals/good vs evil/everything my characters believe have nothing to do with my morals/beliefs/religion

tolkien: and that character that comes back from the dead has nothing to do with my religion which is based on someone coming back from the dead and uses coming back from the dead as metaphor literally constantly so don’t get any ideas

tolkien: and none of those giant evil spiders have anything to do with the tarantula that bit me either

clive staples: jirt youre literally so stupid

tolkien:

clive:

tolkien: that really slow grumpy tree who takes forever to get to the point or make up his mind is definitely you though

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Crack theory because I’m impatient

This panel has always bothered me because I didn’t know why she was dividing the gods between the maiden, mother, and crone aspects. Then I remembered that one variation of that Trinity has the Maiden as a sky goddess, the Mother as an earth goddess, and the Crone as an underworld goddess.

So:

Amaterasu, Inanna, Mimir, and Sahkmet as sky gods

Dionysus, Baal, Tara, and the Norns as earth gods

Lucifer, the Morrigan, Nergal, and Persphone as underworld gods

In other circumstances I think that pre-1831 creature Woden would be an underworld god (as the Gallows God), storm Baal like 1923 would be a sky god, and Persephone could probably also be an earth goddess. But yeah

In 1923:

Baal, Amaterasu, Amon-Ra, and Susano are the sky gods

Set, the Norns, Neptune, and Dionysus are the earth gods

Persephone, the Morrigan, Lucifer, and Woden as underworld gods

It’s not nearly as clean as 2010s but you get the picture. I put Woden as underworld here because of his aesthetic

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As DIE 3 and the 2nd printing of DIE 2 have sold out, we’re doing the logical thing and going to press again. The press-release is here, including all the details here, but the key bits…

Die #2, third printing (Diamond Code JAN198202) and Die #3, second printing (Diamond Code JAN198203) will be available on Wednesday, March 13. The final order cutoff deadline for comic shop retailers is Monday, Feb 18.

So speak to your retailer before then if you want to ensure a copy. Issue 1′s third printing is coming, so you can get them all and jump aboard.

Honestly, seeing what Stephanie does every time we get a “Another printing?” mail is an excellent part of this job.

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DIE #3, by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, Clayton Cowles ...

Thoughts on this poster. Spoilers beneath the cut.

Seen in a hobbit’s flashbacks to Little England, the propaganda poster is remarkably complex. Against a red background featuring dragons and a number of eight-sided stars (or stylized suns), a lion, its mane stylized to resemble rays of sun, speaks to potential recruits from a centered, pale circle, its words - “I need you!” - punctuated with dots evocative of the Tengwar alphabet. Much like Uncle Sam, who points and glares at the viewer in the famous recruitment image, the lion has a paw outstretched and pointing - though it it is with claws that he points, not fingers, and a gaping maw that shows many teeth, that both speaks and speaks to devouring, to fire and mutilation. 

The poster calls back to other references - the use of lions as a national symbol in British war propaganda, for instance, not least in propaganda aimed at "overseas states” - Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand:

As @gen-is-gone has pointed out on Twitter and for the @die-compressed podcast (which includes many great observations), the sun-lion also works as a reference to Aslan, to C. S. Lewis and his approach to fantasy. 

Tolkien has been a presence in the comic from the beginning (Isabelle calls Ash "Gaylord of the Assrings" in the first issue, the second issue reckons with the legacies of elves and orcs, etc), but so too has Lewis, invoked in the second issue by Chuck:

DIE #2, by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, Clayton Cowles ...

Leaving aside this meta-commentary on the relationship between how you enter Die and how you enter Narnia, the relationship between the recruitment poster and Narnia’s Aslan is laid out with more than lion imagery. In the books, Aslan is associated with the sun and related emblems, such as gold (much as Solomon has been in the comic, as the “golden child” nicknamed “Sol” ... ). A “rhyme” about Aslan in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, includes the lines: “when he [Aslan] bares his teeth winter meets its death and when he shakes his mane we shall have spring again”. Echoes of this Aslan-as-Christ-allegory is not only to be seen in the poster, it can also be heard when the comic’s hobbit-reference speaks of being promised spring ... and concludes the promise was false. 

Given Tolkien’s apparent dislike of Narnia, his critiques of allegory for its dictatorial relationship to readers, for its reduction of interpretative freedom to the act of recognizing one-to-one correspondences between fiction and religious ideas or historical events, it’s notable that his reference character in Die is stuck in an a place that situates his work against WWI. But if allegory is veiled comparison, this “hell” unveils. There’s no coyness here about the terms of comparison. 

On the contrary - allegory is “ugly”, Tolkien’s reference says, but “poetry” and “war poetry” are something else. What they are is not directly stated; what they could be is hinted at in how, by telling the life-stories of the dead, the comic’s poet-like character - Ash, a kind of bard - invokes grief, making it possible for Matt to kill the dragon. Warden of the “orcish mockery of my elvish tale”, the Tolkien reference character also bears witness to how war devours “better men”, as though to ask readers to imagine the hobbits not only as references of his own creation and his own history, but also as references to dead who can no longer speak for themselves. To be sure, “this is not what I wanted”. Whether he refers to his antipathy towards “ugly” allegory, to Die’s interpretation of his “elvish tale”, or to something else, he also acknowledges that - still, the dead “should be remembered”, their “message” sent “home”, and so he stays. 

(There’s a lot of weight put on this staying. Whether he must stay in the trenches or could be elsewhere in Little England is one question; possibly he stays too as an enduring presence or legacy). 

At the same time, the Tolkien reference is shown to be an inefficient messenger. The eagle he sends is far too large and easily spotted; the message is shot down with the messenger. If his attempts to keep memory alive with “poetry”, or “war poetry”, are potentially recognized in a comic that itself draws on poetic techniques (by which I mean: techniques that create patterns with words, producing relations of similarity and dissimilarity - I’m not using poetry as a synonym for romanticization), there also remains plenty of room to critique his methods.

Not only his. There is something indeed rather sinister, to me at least, about the poster of the British Lion as the Sun / Aslan. The Tolkien reference in Die is an officer who sends men to their deaths but also directly risks his own life in the trenches (assuming he can die as the Grandmaster apparently could). He honors the memories of the dead - memories that are subsequently captured, declared propaganda by the enemy (a rival Master?), and destroyed. What is destroyed with those final words, those words Ash herself noted down for a dying man, is certainly a critique of propaganda - critique of the reference to Narnia-as-allegory. The hobbit reference warns his family, tells his wife not to send their boy into battle. For the lion poster tricks the vulnerable into believing there will be spring, and sells lies about a life beyond war, beyond death.

Such allegory would be “ugly”, indeed.

Taking another close look at the poster - those eight-sided stars, in addition to referencing suns (and sun-gods), could they also be a reference to the numbered face occupied by Little England on the D20 world that is Die? Looking at Angela’s map in issue #2, the route through the war zone seems to snake between the faces numbered 8 and 9, which could be Little England and Eternal Prussia, respectively, while 10 would correspond to the Seas of Gondol.

In this context, it’s worth noting that star symbols have come up before - the Elf-Queen wore two five-sided stars that dangled from her tiara and another on her chest, from where it shines. 

This could suggest she is from a realm correlating to the face numbered 5 on the map - which, to be sure, isn’t shown. By the time we see Angela’s map, the party has been traveling a while, so their position around 7 may not reflect where they started. But it's certainly possible that the stars correspond to something else; my point is more that stars have been prominently shown and might be worth paying attention to in future (similarly, Chuck’s necklaces? are fascinating ...).

(I’m a bit worried this comes across as though I were trying to nail down what the comic is - which is not the intention at all. The comic seems to be doing hundreds of things at once, which makes me want to think aloud - because that is fun and a good distraction from darker places. That’s all these posts are about, that and the hope of getting to talk to others about the comic.) 

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some of you have never simply walked into mordor and it shows

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There are many reasons to read DIE in print, including the sheer scale of the image and power of the colors, but it’s the dramaturgy of the page-turns that really motivates me to say this, as it’s an element that doesn’t quite translate on the screen. Turning the page to reveal a full-page spread can be such an magical, immersive pleasure. Turning the page on that final image in the third issue, where the question ‘would you follow’ is effectively answered in the negative by closing the story - it adds an extra level of conflict, at least for me. The amount of thought Gillen and Hans have put into this invisible condition (this frame that conditions the visible) is staggering, inspiring.

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“Unlike Tolkien, the Brontës are not known for their contribution to genre fiction, but they may not be a part of Die for the work they did as writers but as players. Tolkien was the historian of his world, but the Brontës were both the characters and the gods of the worlds they created. More than that, they were gods in the style of the Greek pantheon, squabbling and petty and actively involved, killing off each other’s favorites and then bringing their own back to life, and their games about Glass Town, Gondal, and Angria were collaborative in the way that Tolkien’s exhaustive world-building was not.”

There’s probably going to be a lot about the Tolkien in DIE #3, but she writes about the Brontës and it’s going to be significant.

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the third issue of DIE was ... a lot. I’m only beginning to understand it, and only very imperfectly. But I keep coming back to it, and have now collected myself enough to think aloud. Spoilers beneath the cut.

DIE makes use of poetic structures from the very first issue. There are rhymes everywhere - die, lie, cry, deny, defy, dry, spy, eye. Sol wearing a die in each eye is as poetic as it is logical. 

I thought I was reaching really badly, thinking of DIE in poetic terms, and gave up thinking about it. This issue makes me want to keep thinking. It’s set up as a chiasmus of sorts: it begins with dungeons and dragons and ends with a (dead) dragon and a (march into a) dungeon, and in the process the meaning of dungeon and the meaning of dragon are both radically changed.

Between the appearance of the dragon and its death, Ash ends up in a hole. It is, to cite Tolkien and his reference character in the comic, a “nasty, dirty, wet hole” -- a trench that Stephanie Hans makes immediately evocative of WWI and the trench fever the historical person named Tolkien caught there. In this fictional trench, Ash encounters four hobbit-sized soldiers: a dead ringer for Frodo who proudly displays the wedding ring that weighs on him and is never invisible, his brave Samwise-equivalent who dearly wishes to see elves and whose eyes have melted out, a dead (halved - the pun was a little gruesome) halfling named “Mister P”, and another dead, unnamed fourth friend (Merry is not a word to be applied here). After the Frodo character dictates a letter to Luthi, the wife who references the name Tolkien associated with his own wife, it becomes clear there will be no “there and back again” for him either. His death is punctuated by the appearance of an officer who wears Tolkien’s face and cites his pipe-smoking habit. He does some interesting editing work on a passage from The Hobbit, switching what was nice to what is nasty, replacing life with death:

“In a hole in the ground there lived died a hobbit an Englander. Not a nasty, dirty, wet nice hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort., but a nasty, dirty, wet hole, a charnel hole ...” (the bold bit is added in the comic; the final bit is, however,  not wholly new, but a reversal of the order in which those words were originally used)

Ash recognizes the reference and the person for whom the officer stands, deconstructs the whole down to its seemingly simple, idealized, dismissible parts, recognizing that she is seeing fictional references in context - in context that is at once fictional, trope-y, and reflective of real facts of Tolkien’s biography, of the real sacrifices and horrors of war - and struggles to come to terms with the hurt she feels. The Die-representative of Tolkien responds with another transformative line:  “Allegories are ugly. But poetry? Poetry is poetry, and war poetry most of all.”

This line arrested me when I first saw it, mostly because of the quadruple repetition of the word poetry in a context defined by fours: Ash has the D4 in her chest, plus there are the four dead hobbits (and four that will replace them in the closing sequence, walking into the dungeon in another flip, this time of “one does not simply walk into Mordor”). But I had zero inkling of what it could mean until I found the citation it reframes. In response to readers who insisted on reducing his books to allegories for historical events or ideas, to fixed, defined, unchanging, top-down issued references, Tolkien wrote:

“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.” -- foreword to Fellowship of the Ring

Gillen thus replaces “history” with “poetry” and “war poetry” (a potential label for the issue itself), but keeps the opposition to allegories that dictate how a story should be read and interpreted. 

The ending of the issue seems to reflect that desire to privilege readerly liberty, to open up a singular set of references to a question that concerns all readers - world war. (The closing image does this too, putting the reader right behind the four soldiers, as though to say - will you follow?) “Where would we have been if we were sixteen in 1914?” asks Matt. “Who volunteers to come to a dungeon?” Ash asks, concluding: “Better people than us”. The line calls back to how, in the eyes of the Frodo stand-in, she stood for the “high folks”, in contrast to the “low” “likes of us” used as cannon-fodder for "wizards and their schemes”. The final image has four Prussian hobbits, indistinguishable from the four who just died, killing the eagle sent to deliver the message for Luthi. Their officer (is he a reference too?) reads the letter, a letter any one of them would have wanted to send in the same situation, tells them they have stopped propaganda from being sent (a lie), burns the letter much like the dragon burned and gassed the four Englanders, then coolly sends them into the dungeon that is the war front, leaving the reader to reflect on ... a lot. 

Like - how much of this specific situation was caused by Angela’s rush for Fair Gold to power her suit? Did the four dead ringers die because the dragon was brought out to stop her and the party? Or - what are the conditions under which fantasy and poetry are produced and consumed in the first place, and what are the costs? What is its legacy, and what of it does it choose to hide or reveal?

The repetitions of “foul” come to mind here. In this issue, foul is used first by the Frodo character as he tries to determine Ash’s allegiance (“fair or foul?”). Ash then silently characterizes herself, in her Bard/Dictator role, as foul to most people. Having dismissed elves as “dumb and obvious” in the past issue, only for the elf queen to transform into a murderous orc, Ash takes a more measured position on Tolkien here by recognizing the value of hobbits. As a result, the Master Who Looks and Talks Like Tolkien concludes she is not “entirely foul”. However one interprets this, it seems plausible that “fair and foul” could to be a question for the entire comic - two opposites held together and impossible to rend apart.

(What is fair, what is foul about the emotional manipulation the comic itself produces through Ash’s reaction, Matt’s reaction, and in the reader? Notice how the comic, by virtue of its having pages, puts the reader through the motions of closing the page on the four as they "simply walk" into Mordor, thereby putting the reader on the same side as the party on the question "who volunteers".  Then there are metaphorical levels - what is foul about Angela going for FAIR gold? how shall the fair "alabaster princess" Ash reconcile herself to also being ash, ready to crumble under dragons’ breath, to the foul words that created the fouling corpse of a former lover who fairly? cursed her back? etc etc)

It looks like the next stop in the story is going to be the space of Brontë sister gaming, (a stop in a town invented by the mothers of gaming as this war-torn realm was regulated by the father of fantasy?), which starts up even more questions. But I’ve gone on long enough; looking forward to seeing how it all develops, textually and visually -

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Out Today: DIE #3 and Star Wars #62

DIE 3 is out, where we put the third side on our narrative pyramid.

I’ll write some more in the newsletter later, I’m sure, but this is one Stephanie and I are really fond of. It’s this bleak edifice of a book, and Stephanie has rendered it wonderfully. Hope you find it interesting.

Preview here. Digital here.

The epilogue of THE ESCAPE has Andrea Broccardo returning to the book to set things up for my final arc. Digital here.

Oh - while we’re talking comics out this week, I want to highlight Chip Zdarsky and Marco Checchetto’s Daredevil run which starts today. I’ve read the first issue, and it’s fantastic Daredevil. It glowers and shine and I love it.

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DIE #3 is a very meta issue that is solidly grounded in Stephanie Hans’ amazing art and a very human representation of how fucking awful war is.

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“FANTASY HEARTBREAKER,” Part Three One of the saddest comics in Kieron’s career. One of Stephanie’s prettiest. Clayton’s lettering, of course, remains impeccable.

Out tomorrow (Feb 5th). Covers here. Purchase details here.

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@miklausnotes replied:

I became deathly afraid reading this. My heart rate! V important questions indeed.

I'm glad the questions resonated! They were born of insomnia - I kept asking myself "why don't the other Norns have regular names" and ended up with "so that Laura can feel guilty when they die, and say, 'I never knew their names'." Which seemed a bit hastily reasoned when written out, so these questions emerged instead.

Speculative and spoiler-y thoughts on wicdiv below the cut; if you haven’t seen the solicits for #42 and #43 and/or prefer to go into the coming issues cold, don’t read this.

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