Die vol. 3: The Great Game

The party has split as a result of Ash’s manipulations and she now finds herself as the Queen of Angria, with Isabelle as a mostly-willing partner in this and Sol still rotting as a Fallen in the dungeon.  They want to leave the world of Die, but they also want to do so in a way that leaves it in better shape than they did the last time.  It’s a great idea.  In theory at least.  That’s because before they can really do anything, they’re faced with an invasion by the neighboring country of Little England.  This is because they believe the (absolutely true) rumor that Ash and her party were responsible for the destruction of Glass Town.  So while half the party manages the tricky business of warfare, Chuck, Matt, and Angela are trying to get far enough away from it to figure out how to convince their (former?) friends to return right now.  The problem is that the first part of their plan involves a dungeon crawl through the sewers…

It gets better for them, and for the reader as well.  “Die” still isn’t as engaging as writer Kieron Gillen’s other work, but the upward trend of quality established in vol. 2 continues here.  The morose horror aesthetic of the series still feels like it’s smothering the writer’s wit, though I’m impressed with how many quality one-liners he manages to sneak in here regardless.  There’s also a lot of successful examples of setup and payoff here.  Sometimes it’s stuff that was set up in a previous volume, other times only a few pages ago.  The best example of this comes when we meet the Master of Little England and find out his historical connection to gaming.  Along with the way that he may have screwed it all up in the end.

Artist Stephanie Hans produces more quality work here, even if we don’t get any big double-page splashes of Angria and Little England at war.  What sticks out for me here are the designs for the various gods that Isabelle has bound that she has come up with here.  They’re all wonderfully distinctive and I find myself wanting to know much more about her history with the False Friend just based on his design alone.  That likely won’t happen as vol. 4 is going to be the final one for this series.  I find that to be a much more disappointing prospect based on what I think about the series now as opposed to what I thought of it after reading vol. 1.