Cover image: Die, Volume 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker (Image Comics)

Fantasy

Die

Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans · Image, 2018–21

In 1991 six teenagers sat down to play a roleplaying game and vanished. Two years later, five came back, and none of them has ever talked about what happened. Now they are in their forties, and the game wants them back. This time they will have to face what they did there, and what it did to them.

It is a sort of Jumanji for goths, a dark fantasy that takes apart the history of the genre, from Tolkien to the Brontës, and the tabletop games that grew from it. Stephanie Hans's painted art is lush and moody, and Gillen later turned the fictional game into a real one (see the SFcrowsnest tabletop guide).

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