DIE: Loaded #6 // Review
There are a number of people meeting-up at the Prancing Pony. They’re all there in the other world. There’s a lot of anger and animosity, but nothing truly bad can happen. It’s probably a good thing that there’s a general desire for them not to kill each other. There’s the generla impression that they’re not getting home if one of them dies. This isn’t exactly true, though. Things continue to feel quite unsettled in DIE: Loaded #6. Writer Kieron Gillen and artist Stephanie Hans continue their journey into dark fantasy with a complex and textured ensemble of interesting characters.
The hope is that Molly can get home alive. Of course...it’s not a good idea to bring home a murderer either. If someone dies in the RPG, they don’t get a vote. Everyone else can come home. They get left behind. Violet’s mentioning this while she’s being choked by an exotic weapon that bears some resemblance to a bicycle chain from another era. Molly could have killed her, but she didn’t. Now at least one other person knows that Molly can be trusted. Still...there IS some concern about the identity of the establishment and what the Prancing Pony meant to the heroes in The Lord of the Rings...
Gillen is working with an incredibly dense ensemble of characters that all seem to be totally at each other’s throats in one way or another. There’s enough texture to all of the animosity that keeps it from getting dull, but there’s a hell of a lot more going on between the members of the ensemble than there is going on between them and the world in which they’re residing. And so it feels more than a little light beyond the ensemble, but that’s fine as the characters themselves are actually pretty interesting.
Hans frames the drama between the characters with a great degree of tension. That goes a long way towards selling the visual substance of the story, but the action feels more than a bit flat when it hits the page. The overall feel of it all ends up lacking some degree of fantasy and wonder. Take away a few of the elements of fantasy and it still might be able to work as a drama. As a result, it doesn’t quite feel like it’s totally necessary for it to be fantasy. The visuals have difficulty capturing a fantasy in the fantasy that’s largely missing.
The characters at the heart of the series continue to be interesting and their drama is strikingly vivid, but there isn’t enough beyond the ensemble to really sell the series as a terribly compelling fantasy. Still...it IS fun to hang out with these characters one more time as the series continues to develop in all those directions in which it’s developing. It’ll be fun to see where Gillen and company are ultimately leading the characters. It just feels like the current series still hasn’t quite built-up the right kind of momentum to really turn into something.
