A sequel series is always a difficult thing. A new series can be given a measure of grace as the concept and characters are new and need to be established for a new audience. But a sequel has expectations to meet. The same tricks can’t be pulled again as that audience has returned and is wise to—or marginally aware of—enough of the world. The best thing a sequel can do, then, is work within those expectations and show us what we had missed in the initial series. This is exactly what Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, and Clayton Cowles have with DIE: Loaded #1.

The last time I looked at DIE, we broke down some of the basics of the world: the table-top role playing game nature of the world, the classes the characters inhabit, and how they’ve come to this place. But what we have in this first issue is the group a year after they had exited the world of DIE and are getting back to relative normal. Ash is a father now while his partner, Sophie, has been dealing with being a single mother since he’s been gone while the rest of party are dealing with the lives they had left behind before Covid—fun to escape a deadly RPG world and then immediately be put into Covid lock-downs. The party, though, has reconvened to an extent at Chuck’s memorial service where they have all been left gifts from Chuck—likely something concocted in his will as he had died in DIE. While Ash receives a little figurine from Chuck, Sophie is given a die. A die from DIE. A die that brings her to the world that Ash had only just escaped. 

There’s a fun aspect of Die: Loaded that goes beyond the text of the comic itself as the world now has its own mechanics and lore freely available for whoever buys the manual for the DIE role playing game. Because of this, we’re going into the sequel series with more knowledge than what the original series had given us. Gillen himself had created the entire RPG framework DIE was based on to better write the story, but that was all on his end. With the manual out in the world, we can come into the story with the tools of the world that even the original party may have missed as we’re coming into them outside of life-or-death situations. It is one of the only series I can think of that’s done anything similar outside of licensed Dungeons & Dragons comics, This, though, adds a bit of excitement about the story story as we’re witnessing someone play the game for the first time, much in the same way we would be if we were sitting down to play it ourselves.

DIE: Loaded avoids so many issues with the sequel series by literally throwing us straight into the deepest depths of the deep end with a character we’ve barely just met in the present. We have stakes that are immediately menacing and no real clue where the story could go from this point outside of the worst places possible. 

Get excited. Get back.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.