We Roll a Nat 20 for Interviewing and Talk to the Creative Team behind DIE

If you’ve been keeping up with our reviews of Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’ Image Comics series DIE, you may have caught on that we’re big fans. With the publication of the series finale last month, we wanted to take the opportunity to look back on the comic’s creation and development. 

To accomplish this, in the leadup to the comic’s end, we interviewed the entire creative team, including Gillen, Hans, letterer Clayton Cowles, editor Chrissy Williams and designer Rian Hughes, to create a more complete picture of the creative process behind one of our favorite series from the past few years. We covered each stage of the comic’s creation, from its inception to its finale, so be warned, here be spoilers.

Endgame

ComicsXF: As you prepare to ship the final issue, do you have any fears about how it will be received? What issue or storyline were you most worried about?

Kieron Gillen: People have given us a huge amount of faith. I don’t want to jinx it, but considering some of the things which our readership have gone along with, I don’t think there’s much in issue #20 which will lose people. Compared to the potential disaster that was issue #19, I’m almost chill about it. Almost.

This feels like a loaded question, though.

CXF: You say “almost” chill. I guess what I was getting at in my question was the idea that this is one of your big creator-owned comics, and you’re about to ship the finale, which will be your final word on this story, if not this world. Your work is finished on it, it’s ready to go out, it’s far too late to stop or change it. I know everyone would like to lean toward the more stoical and say, “It’s out of my hands, therefore I shouldn’t worry about it,” but there’s saying it and then there’s believing it; the intellectual and the emotional knowledge of a thing. So, tl;dr: how are you feeling?

Gillen: Ah! That makes sense.

No, I really am pretty chill and stoic. It’s partially that I have done this before enough, in various ways, to be comfortable. DIE is deliberately aggressively personal and philosophical work, filed with Phonogram. I have to be fine with people not liking it if they don’t like it. That won’t change why I wrote it, right? I certainly hope people get it, and would be very sad if it didn’t touch the people I think should be touched by it, but that would imply I’m a lot more alone in the world than I feared, not anything to do with the work.

In my old age I remain anxious about people in lots of ways, but in terms of the quality of the work, it doesn’t weigh upon me hugely, especially in stuff like DIE. You have two wolves inside you, and one of mine is Alan Moore, in Northampton, just doing his thing.

Stephanie Hans: I have no fear anymore, issue #20 is a great issue, my only fear is to feel lonely after. I got so used to the love we received. It is a bit sad to think we won’t be able to read people’s reactions every month. I will miss that.

CXF: Ash’s ongoing struggle with their identity was one of the most powerful parts of the series for me [Corey], and the entirety of the resolution in issue #19 hit me harder than anything I’ve seen in a long time. What difficulties did you face in writing that arc, and is there anything you would have handled differently with hindsight?

Gillen: Thank you. I allude to above, it was a high-wire act. Anything with Ash and gender is stuff I talked to intensely with [sensitivity consultant] Natalie [Reed], and most of that circled around what tripped her and what needed more clarification. I knew what I was trying to do with it, and we wanted to ensure it was being communicated. We tried to get ahead of as many angles of misunderstanding as possible. And even with that, you’re also aware that any community will have different takes on everything. That’s the first thing any sensitivity consultant will say when giving their feedback – it’s their feedback. People aren’t a monolith. People are individual people. It’s an unusual story in a few ways – it’s a coming out story where its lead doesn’t actually come out as anything, and says that’s just fine – and even conceptually that may bug some folk. I don’t know. You never really know.

That we haven’t had anyone point out anything we did horrifically wrong makes me not want to change anything, for fear that it’s a supporting straw in a game of narrative kerplunk, and if we move it the whole thing comes crashing down. I’m proud of what we did. I wanted to find Ash. I think we did.

CXF: You mentioned in previous interviews that you also worked with a disability sensitivity reader to inform your writing of Angela. Was her overall character arc influenced by those consultations?

Gillen: Relatively little in terms of the core arc because I knew her core story isn’t about her disability. “Shall I stay on DIE because I have a magic hand!” is not the story. In fact, we lampshade that hard early on, and reject it fully in issue #6. Her appearance was about inclusion, and most of it with Sally [Couch] was that – making sure the presentation was grounded. There’s something I say about stories featuring characters’ perspectives different from my own – speaking broadly, if it’s a story about that part of their identity, I don’t write it. However, I also write knowing that their identity will impact how they traverse any story. So – to choose a WicDiv example – Cassandra’s story wasn’t about being Trans, but elements in the story (like how she kept her name when becoming a god) were 100% informed by that.

Angela’s like that, and most of what Sally gave us was picking up on elements we may not have considered sufficiently. I remember this most cleanly early on – things tweaking expressions when she got her cybernetic hand, or talking about the nature of the coat she wore and stuff.

Speaking broadly, I mostly turn to consultants when I’m aware I’m stepping into a minefield. Sally wasn’t the only person I talked to. I talked to Ramsey Hassan regarding certain things with Matt and a whole lot with Natalie Reed about Ash. All three were amazing readers, and gave us so much back. 

I’m going to add a simple statement, which I’m hoping we’re reaching the point of not needing to say, but I suspect we still do: They got paid. Pay sensitivity consultants.

CXF: Looking back on this finished work, is there anything you don’t think worked quite as well as you had intended? Are there any stories you wanted to explore and flesh out more than the strict 20-issue format would have allowed?

Gillen: Oh, it’s far too early to go pointing at what I consider flaws. When people are still chewing it, it’s not for me to say that I think it’s too salty or I should have added more oregano or whatever.

CXF: Stephanie, is there anything in the comic that you’re disappointed you didn’t get to draw?

Hans: Not really. I had dragons, I was happy.

I wish I had time for more backstories, I wish I could have spared some time for more pages, I wish I could have explored a bit more of Isabelle’s life, but I am not disappointed.

CXF: Readers of the trade paperbacks got small glimpses of character backstory, in the form of simple illustrations of the characters as teens, usually in happier times. What was the genesis of these? Were they always intended for the trades?

Hans: Yes, these illustrations were always planned for the trade. I think about them as a breath in the timeline, a little rest to remind readers that the protagonists were once friends and innocents, and had a very normal life. When there is an episode with the robot dog dying, having Angela’s real-life childhood puppy sleeping makes it extra heartbreaking. It adds layers and flesh to the characters, I think, and gives the reader an opportunity to just take a break and think about the implications of what happens.

Character Generation

CXF: How did you come up with this cast of characters? Was it always going to be this party?

Gillen: Sol came first. The original idea of the whole thing. Peter Pan as serial killer. The awful idea born of wondering how much I had been emotionally stunted by my love of all this. The thought upset me, so that had to be first. Ash followed. Stuff I wanted to write about and I hadn’t.

The rest – and many details of Ash – were constructed by me thinking about the sort of people I played with in games in the early ‘90s, and those tensions, and possible ways they could go in life. Some of it was just thinking of the basic axes in the book. This is a book of 40-somethings looking back at their choices, and their nagging regrets. I wanted characters to embody a bunch of them … and also show that whatever path there is, there’s regrets. Angela has had kids, and is mid-divorce, and broadly made a mess of family, and is tortured by it. Matt has had kids, now grown, a happy marriage … and beneath it, there’s the awareness that those 20 years are over, and he is afraid of what’s next. Also, giving sufficient variety inside it to make sure I’m implying more. Take even having kids, for example. Ash wanted kids and couldn’t have them, and regrets it. Izzy never wanted kids, and has no regrets about that … but a lot of sadness elsewhere. Izzy makes it clear that the book isn’t just saying that one simple thing.

DIE also deliberately piled more elements into characters than many of my previous books. It’s a messier form of storytelling than WicDiv. In WicDiv, characters mostly have one core element – Dionysus’ conversation with altruism, Baal’s with duty, etc. In DIE, they’ve got several, in conversation with one another. They stayed fluid for much longer than WicDiv’s ones.

I had done a lot of work, when Stephanie got involved, and added several key elements. Izzy is the one where you see most of her influence.

CXF: Children’s relationships with parents have often been a strong theme in your comics (Journey into Mystery, Young Avengers, The Wicked + The Divine), but this is the first time, to my knowledge, that you’ve explored it from the point of view of the parent. Is this purely a matter of character motivation, or is there some deeper commentary you wanted to make?

Gillen: It’s a weird fluke that I fell into writing about young people for the best part of a decade, right? Phonogram was a book about something people count as youth culture, but was primarily about your 20s – all the Phonomancers basically graduate to something else at 30, and two arcs are explicitly about that. It’s not a teenage book. And then, at Marvel, I just got offered these teen jobs. Generation Hope to start with. I was thinking of a sexy Elric-y Loki book, and then Matt turned him into a Kid. I was actively reluctant to do Young Avengers to begin with, and primarily went for it out of a chance to bring the full Phonogram skill-set to bear on a Marvel book. WicDiv is on us, but was very much born of “Hey, probably best do something which at least rhymes with this enormously successful book we’ve just done elsewhere.” 

So one of the goals after finishing WicDiv was “My next book needs to star people at least as old as I am.” If you’re doing a group cast with realistic characters, parenthood is at least on the menu, for some characters. I’m not sure what you mean about “character motivation vs. deeper commentary.” They’re not contradictory. They’re often the same.

CXF: Which character designs came first? Teen, adult or in-game?

Hans: The first design was Ash, as it was already the main protagonist and from her design, the other ones would follow. It had to be the right kind of character. 

When we first talked about Ash as a teen, I thought of the idea of making this one a metalhead, as there were so many of them in my art school, those guys hiding behind long hair and battle jackets, with their art folders covered in Iron Maiden stickers. They were this era’s romantics. The first design was actually very inspired by Eddie the Head before Kieron told me she was more like royalty and I backpedaled a bit. She kept the white hair and scorched face when she uses her powers, though.

CXF: Chrissy, you’ve been editing Kieron’s Image work since The Wicked + The Divine, near as we can figure out. What is your day-to-day process like, working together?

Chrissy Williams: Ah, the days are long and full of tea … I actually started off proofreading Kieron’s Avatar work originally. I worked in book publishing as an editor for years, though not in comics, and he just wanted an extra proofreader at a couple of stages.

That gradually turned into more involved editing, giving back more nuanced commentary and responses to scripts. By the time we got to WicDiv I was a fully freelance editor, and gradually grew the script editor role into taking on more project management stuff as well, working with external designers and production at Image, etc., to keep everything flowing smoothly. Fundamentally, though, the main part of my job is script editing — that’s the actual creative core of it.

In terms of what the process is like? To start with, Kieron will send me a script for a first edit, before anyone else has seen it. This is where I do a pass for three main things: 1) straightforward things like checking everything is numbered properly and the artist has been given all the relevant reference material they might need in order to draw the script; 2) more story-focused things, pointing out any continuity issues either within this issue or clashing with previous issues, as well as pointing out bits that I think will be confusing to a reader; 3) trickier things, like when I think a character isn’t being communicated authentically, or where I feel that a story beat isn’t quite landing. I don’t make that many comments in this last category, to be honest, but when I do, they always prompt a bit of a back-and-forth conversation. 

Kieron and I have learnt over the years to treat this conversation as if we’re both working on a puzzle together — though in the early days my feedback was probably sometimes too prescriptive, and his reactions probably sometimes too precious. But we’ve been working together for over a decade now, so it all tends to go smoothly? 

I’m immediately recalling fights we’ve had over specific script points which contradicts that though! As well as instances when I’ve handed back scripts where I totally failed to address one of the above points sufficiently. Ack — publishing. Why do the mistakes always stick out more than the successes?! I guess because the whole point of the editor’s job is to make the successes seem as organic and seamless as possible? Ack, ack, ack. It’s all a process, though. Like anything, you learn from those experiences and apply it to the next script. Or that’s the hope, anyway.

Anyway, that’s just the first pass! After that, Kieron makes the pertinent changes and it goes over to the artist for pencils. Although Kieron answers most of the artist’s queries directly as they come up, I weigh in here too when I can help clarify something or point out potential problems. I very much let the writer lead, though. On DIE, at this stage, I see myself primarily as a “Chuck’s earring is missing” or “there’s not enough space in this panel for all the Kieron-babble” sort of problem-solver.   

Then, once we have art back, Kieron goes through and generates a lettering draft. I think this is probably my favourite stage, to be honest, because all the big beats are already decided, and it’s about polishing up the minute nuances of how each character might phrase each thought, each sentence. It’s very intimate, and I think it’s where I feel closest to the characters. My creative background is in poetry, so I get very very attached to the cadences and voices and literal words of the characters. You don’t have accents or intonation or the spoken delivery of speech to work with — just the art on the page and the printed words you put over them, and I find that very exciting. 

Then we go over it all again on the finished page for a (theoretically) final polish, when the lettered comic draft comes back from the letterer (I can hear our letterer Clayton laughing grimly in my head at this — it’s never the final polish). It feels like the script is constantly evolving until that final pass, as we find the best balance between what the art and the words each carry.

Wow, that was a long first answer, apologies. Who do I think I am with all these words — Kieron?  

CXF: Kieron has described your collaboration as you making sure that he’s gotten across what he thinks he’s gotten across. How do you see it?

Williams: Yes, I think that’s it, in a nutshell. Because my primary focus is words and story, the majority of my work is always with the writer. 

It’s vital to have a conscientious first reader who is comfortable with telling you bluntly, “Oi, this bit makes no sense.” I think it’s essential to have an external person you can bounce ideas against. Especially with someone like Kieron, whose brain seems to be a mechanism for devising complexity. 

I’m writing my own comic at the moment (It’ll be published next year, but I can’t really talk about it yet!), and I’m working with an external editor on that. I don’t think any writer can have the necessary distance to truly see how the world they’re living in and dreaming about 24/7 comes across to new readers unless someone tells them. Some things seem obvious to you when you’re inhaling them daily, whereas to new readers they will just seem confusing. And better to be told at script stage than after publication. 

CXF: How has the experience of editing DIE differed from prior comics projects?

Williams: Less teenagers, more dice? Erm … Every project I’ve worked on has felt different, because the people working on it are different. Different artists and designers bring their own new working relationships to build and sustain. Different art styles also mean different storytelling styles and choices, and scripts usually need to be adapted to suit different artists.  Working with Stephanie has been wonderful — her art is so atmospheric, I feel like I want to crawl into it. She brings so much emotion into her work — it means a lot of the final lettering changes we make are often deleting lines we no longer need because the art is so expressive. 

Projects also differ from each other vastly because of the subject matter. That the cast of DIE are all older brings a different set of characteristics and sensibilities to it than, say, WicDiv for example. Having something so embedded in RPG and gaming has also brought its own different atmosphere and set of challenges. All the deep dives into Tolkien, the Brontës, Lovecraft, etc., have been really fun. You know it’s a Kieron Gillen script when the reading list goes over the page. 

CXF: Clayton, how much of DIE’s lettering, from balloons to tails to captions, to the letters themselves, was custom designed for this title?

Clayton Cowles: I think 50% of it was custom designed. The fonts and main dialogue balloons all existed before, but I created a custom stroke for the balloons just for DIE (and then used liberally elsewhere). All of the specialized voices for the gods and stuff were created just for DIE.

CXF: You use the same font for the title page as for the location captions and the Grandmaster character. Did this font choice come from Rian Hughes, or was it your choice? 

Cowles: I don’t remember how the location caption text was settled upon. It was so long ago. Maybe Kieron or Chrissy suggested using the same font, or maybe I did. Maybe it was Rian! Regardless, I’m a big fan of uniformity in design, and I was all for it. But the Grandmaster lettering was my call.

CXF: It’s also similar to how you use a title font for the World Machine’s captions in Eternals. Which came first?

Cowles: Probably the Eternals one. Kieron definitely made that call.

CXF: Rian, how did you end up on the project? What interested you in taking it on?

Rian Hughes: Kieron asked, quite simply. Over a beer, if I recall. And I rate Kieron, so of course it was a no-brainer.

Plus Stephanie’s art is simply gorgeous – she has such a beautiful sense of colour and drama. I knew it was going to be good.

CXF: What were the key things for you while designing the book and its aesthetic? What was paramount for you going in? How did your process go, leading to what you ended up on?

Hughes: Just like the kind of graphic design I like, Kieron is quite structured in his work – there will be motifs and themes that, as a designer, you can pick out, or allude to. Here, of course, it was the different dice, unfolded as “nets,” used both as character icons and as a numbering system for both the 20 comic book issues and the four trades.

CXF: How early were the exploded dice landed on as a visual motif for the series? 

Hughes: Stephanie suggested that in her first cover roughs — I was just running with it! It’s a bold motif to apply to every cover, and could become a stricture in less capable hands, but Stephanie’s covers really made use of it as a device to separate out a foreground and background.

CXF: How involved were you after delivering the initial design? Do you work on it on an issue-by-issue basis?

Hughes: I did around 3-4 colour ways for each cover, and Kieron, Stephanie and Chrissy would choose one. For the interiors, after I’d laid out the first couple of issues, Chrissy very capably took over and followed the basic style – arranging the essays at the back, for example – and then would pass it over to me for fine-tuning. Teamwork, again!

Table Talk

CXF: Throughout the series, there were some subtle differences in the coloring used in scenes set in DIE and Earth. How early did you decide on those different portrayals?

Hans: Very early. Color is very important for me, as I wasn’t such a good artist at the beginning but I was good in composition and colors and used it as much as possible while I was working to make up for my technical issues like anatomy or perspective.

Color is my primary language. 

There needed to be differences. I imagined the present in the first Issue as dull and dark. As a reflection of the way people live. In some ways, DIE is crisper, more vibrant than real life, it is because every decision you take there counts, everything is sharper somehow.

CXF: As an artist who colors their own work, how early in the process do you start thinking of color in your compositions? In the layouts? Roughs?

Hans: My work on colors is very ballistic. I usually know where I am going with flashbacks because they have this softer look, for most parts, but for the rest, everything is possible. I am a very organic painter. It needs to feel right, and there is no real way to plan that. Unless violence is implied, which always leads me to reds. Red is the cloak I wrap my art in when we go combat mode. It makes things crisper. There is something simple in painting a whole scene in red.

CXF: Kieron, you had a career in journalism earlier on, how did it feel to return to a form of journalism in the profiles and interviews in the backmatter of the series?

Gillen: I loathed it. I had spent more than a decade writing profiles, and the process of just writing up an interview – something I’d have done in an afternoon back in the day – took me days. I just couldn’t make myself do it. My brain just rebelled against the process. Hell, I even paid someone else to transcribe it, and it still took me that long.

Well … I enjoyed the actual interviews, though found the prep significantly more stressful than I used to. I also like the finished pieces, and really enjoy having them in the comic. But the actual process was torturous. I am old and weak.

Behind the GM Screen

CXF: How did you land on these specific masters to focus on? Were there others you considered?

Gillen: Well, there’s 20 regions of DIE. There’s plenty we haven’t shown, let alone considered. 

In terms of this story, it’s about the elements that went into the formation of the modern RPG. I wanted one on genre (Tolkien), one on form (Bronte), one on mechanics (Wells and Reiswitz – the story is centered on Wells, as his focus is more useful for us, but Reiswitz is certainly referenced as a Master) and one which vaguely taps the Cosmic Horror nature of DIE itself (Lovecraft). There’s not really anyone you could reasonably replace any of those five for its purpose.

There’s certainly Masters I wish I had a chance to show … but that’s not the focus of this story.

CXF: In The Wicked + The Divine, there were a few instances where you mentioned realizing that certain unplanned ideas resulted in dramatically changed fates for some of the characters (I’m thinking specifically of Baphomet and Dionysus). Whereas in DIE, you’ve discussed being much more free with the storytelling, that there were certain landmarks for where you wanted the story to be by the end of each arc. Did this more freeform approach to storytelling lead to any major deviations from this plan?

Gillen: Well, the Landmarks At End Of Arc model of storytelling is also what I had for WicDiv. In an ongoing, I’ll normally know the rough subject of each arc (a status quo, normally) and the dramatic conclusion. On the other hand, I also know the shape of the characters and their emotional point. I may not always know where they end up, but I know what they’re about. 

So for DIE I knew the end of the first arc the party splits, the end of the second Ash rules Angria and the sides change, the third is a war ending with the realisation they have to go down a fucking dungeon and the fourth is a fucking dungeon. And I knew the characters, and the areas of their life I felt most interesting, and knew that I’d be exploring them across the backbone of the above.

This did lead to some diversions, most tellingly where I burned through the material. Angela is the best example. Issue #6 both rejected any plot about her hand and made her decide it was immoral to have her dog. That’s a big chunk of her already decided – her primary remaining element was her debt to her family, but bar “I need to get back” and possibly “Maybe they are better without me,” that’s not exactly a visual or fantastical element I could use. Luckily I realised that “people coming from the real world” was one of my plot elements for the third arc, and the introduction of Molly as a Fallen gave us a chance to dramatize all those feelings.

There’s bits of that with most of the characters. I knew what they were about. I saw chances of ways to dramatize it the more we went into it. Chuck with the Dwarfs would be a good other example, or Matt and the dual weapons.

CXF: Obviously Chuck’s impending death was a known quantity, and the Fallen’s ability to come back to life by feeding on another player has been baked in from the beginning, but was his sacrifice planned from the beginning? From an in-character standpoint, how much of that was genuine regret, and how much was following the Fool’s typical playstyle?

Gillen: Chuck’s sacrifice was planned from the beginning. That doesn’t mean that I’d necessarily do it … but it was the plan. However, I think I’d rather leave you to interpret that final beat with him – the tension between Chuck the fool and Chuck the Fool is key there. In some ways, Chuck is a very traditional me character – you can see him like an even more noxious version of people like Kohl. “What if Kid-with-Knife got Kohl’s career?” was one of the original ways I thought about him.

CXF: Why the return to Tolkien in the final arc?

Gillen: Moria is the Ur-dungeon of role-playing games. If we’re doing an arc with the structure of a dungeon delve, that’s right there, at the bottom, with a Balrog waiting for you.

CXF: In our review of the finale, we compare the COVID-19 pandemic that the characters return to to the Scouring of the Shire. Did your initial plans for the ending have the characters returning to a changed world, or was it a (profoundly un)happy accident?

Gillen: Writing “The world ends in 2020” and then 2020 happening was some real Alan Moore I Made It Up And It Came True Anyway energy.

It was weird writing scenes of COVID, but also – as you note – an interesting comparison. We know the world changes when we’re away, but not normally like this. I knew I’d have grounded it in the real world somehow, because I always do – my works are almost always period novels, even when the period is “Now.”

CXF: Stephanie, Kieron has mentioned that at least once (in showing the Dictators’ Pyramid) he gave you a number of options as to how to portray it. How often did Kieron’s scripts take the form of a choose-your-own in this way?

Hans: Not very often in this particular way, but he usually is very good at letting me just improvise with designs and backgrounds. This is such a rare treat to have a writer who trusts you to put pictures over their words without being too controlling or descriptive. I am definitely better when I can structure things in my head and wrap them around the words he gives me. 

You see, when Kieron gives me a place or a character, I usually make my own backstory to create the way they clothe themselves. Maybe it is because I spend a lot of time just drawing. It is only technical work, so my mind wanders and daydreams about the places, the way people dress and why, their hairstyles, their jewels.

Metagaming

CXF: Do you see DIE as a work of criticism? If so, what interests you using comics fiction as an avenue for your critical interests?

Gillen: Hmm. I think that simplifies it a bit too much. If I wanted to do something whose primary point is criticism, I’d have just done it, and ended up with something like Understanding Comics, or (relevantly) Edward Ross’ excellent Gamish. But equally, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there are critical elements in there, and is deeply informed by criticism. 

There’s a take I picked up from Ken Hite or Robin D Laws on their podcast, when talking about Glorantha (Greg Stafford’s RPG world). I think it originated with game designer John Wick. Middle-Earth is a world as created by a linguist. Glorantha was a world created by a mythologist. 

I could say that DIE is a world as co-created by a critic. In terms of how DIE works, at every level, is based on someone who is interested in both the form and how it was formed. Its classes are conversations with the nature of those classes. Its great powers personify trends in games, and their wars are dramatizations of the tensions in the form. I mean, the Angria/Eternal Prussia/Little England war is constructed as an extension of Jon Peterson’s thesis in Playing At The World. The whole structure is designed for me to be able to take a detour and explore something which I think is interesting.

I said early on its sister book in my history is actually Phonogram. That was created as a robust metaphor and device to chew over anything to do with music. DIE’s that with games.

CXF: Is immersion in fiction necessarily dangerous? Is creating fictional worlds? What aspect of your creative work/process/whatever do you view with trepidation, as something that might be dangerous?

Gillen: Well, I’ve made a haunted RPG that allows an amoral parasite god to predate upon us. I’m a little nervous about that.

Speaking broadly, a strand of my work tries to inoculate us against fantasy, and encourage one to be a critical reader. The danger of creating a fictional world isn’t so much playing D&D too much. The danger of creating a fictional world is falling into a hole of conspiracies and being radicalised into terrorist actions. I look at most days on Twitter and think, “This is a RPG ran by a malevolent corporation as a GM.”  

I’ll admit, I have been chewing over whether one can ethically do a conspiracy story any more. In the current world, doing anything which seems to encourage that sort of thinking seems a bit off. DIE has one in it, using the dates of history to chain together this berserk view of the last 200 years, but I hope that it is so mystically based that it wouldn’t be taken literally. But if the last decade has taught us anything, you never know what someone will take seriously.

CXF: Rian, XX was so much about the 20th century (and thus the emergence of the 21st), and so is DIE. Did your work on XX inform how you approached a project like this? How does it factor into your body of work for you?

Hughes: I think I look for overarching themes, patterns, motifs in everything I do. If it’s possible to take a few steps back and get meta about it (which Kieron does with RPGs in DIE), interesting and original design ideas can emerge.

With my novel, XX, I thought about why the usual layout of a book has to be the way it is — one font, justified, thought? 

It’s a convention, and one that we can so easily break out of. Different fonts, different layouts can all have interesting expressive and storytelling potential. We can broaden the palette.

In general, I try and do that with most of the design work I do – though sometimes, in certain cases, it isn’t possible, and a more straightforward “logo at the top” design is what publishers would prefer.

Having said that, I do think that underestimates the audience’s appetite for innovation, and when the designer and writer and cover artist can discuss things at a very early stage, it can all seamlessly come together.

CXF: Chrissy, what do you see the role of the editor being in a creator-owned space?

Williams: For me, the role of editor is to try and understand the idea the creators want to make, and help them make the best version of that idea. I don’t feel it’s my place to suggest fixes (unless it’s a clear-cut typo or whatever), but just to articulate problems I had when reading the script, and ask questions for the writer to think about. 

I’ve worked in-house in publishing, though not for comics, and my experience as editor there meant being in charge of hiring and firing, which gave you a certain type of authority. Working in creator-owned comics is fundamentally different — you are only editing a project because the creatives hired you to help them, and you’re not beholden to the needs of any other projects. Fundamentally, the editor’s job is just to support the creative team as best they can.

CXF: What are the similarities and differences between editing poetry and comics? Are questions of rhythm and meter comparable between the two mediums?

Not one-for-one, but broadly speaking, yes. The idea of “economy of line” is really fundamental to both mediums, I think — how to get the most impact within any given space. And my poetry brain is invaluable for editorial work in general, I think. Words can be tricksy.  

I co-edited an “Introduction to Poetry Comics” a few years ago, though — I don’t actually think poetry and comics need to be separate mediums. Getting poets and artists to work together creates quite different sorts of comics pages — once you eliminate the narrative drive of plot and replace it with poetry. There’s not much room for that in story-driven comics, of course, but there are some beautifully poetic comics out there.

Aftercare

CXF: What did you learn in the process of making DIE that you plan on bringing into your next project?

Gillen: The actual real and boring answer: choosing to do 24-25 page issues in an ongoing series made the gaps in publication between arcs even longer, and was brutally hard for Stephanie. If I do another ongoing with Stephanie, I’ll do 20 pages like everyone else.

A lot of the things I learned are things I already knew. But maybe this time they’ll stick, right?

CXF: Clayton, you did a lot of special per-character lettering for the gods and a few other instances. Which was your favorite to do? Which would you go back and do differently now?

Cowles: I feel pretty good about all of the custom voices, to be honest. If I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be the Dreamer’s dialogue. I’m really happy with how it came out. I think Kieron referenced Tyres from Spaced when describing the Dreamer, which is a vivid picture. An aged, flickering neon light that refuses to die (no pun intended). The only one I’d do differently is the Fallen text. I was doing those balloons by hand in the beginning, and I switched to pre-made balloons later to save myself time. I wish I’d done that from the start, if only for consistency’s sake.

CXF: Stephanie, now that you’ve finished your first ongoing series, do you have any desire to draw another, or are you satisfied that you’ve finished one?

Hans: First of all, I am tired so I will need to rest. Which is difficult as I cannot say no to exciting projects. Right now I am open to whatever life will throw at me, but Kieron and I still have stories to tell together. I am looking forward to start thinking about it, once I am properly rested.

Real Play

CXF: Are you involved with the DIE Kickstarter RPG manual?

Cowles: I am not! I gave up everything RPG after my childhood friends and I were spirited away to another realm.

Hughes: For the cover, yes, with a light hand on the interior design when it comes to things like font choice.

Williams: I proofread the Beta, but I am in no way an RPG manual editor, so stayed very hands off in terms of suggesting anything more in depth than correcting typos. I’m relieved we’re working with Rowan, Rook & Decard for the actual Kickstarter manual, as they’re all so knowledgeable and lovely. I’m helping with some minor behind-the-scenes stuff, but to be honest I’m pretty hands off — I’m very happy to leave it to the professional RPGers! Give me some comics or poetry, and I’ll be on them like a shot, though.

My main involvement I would say was playtesting the DIE campaign in 2020. I was an Emotion Knight for 35 sessions, a Shame/Disgust Knight, and the final boss fought us with a skyscraper-sized walking tower composed of all my most intimate experiences of shame. So that was fun. … That’s one thing I will say about working with Kieron so much over the years — you have to come prepared to have emotions.

Hans: I am creating a lot of new illustrations and designs. As usual, words goes to the writer and images to the artist, and I am very happy with that.

CXF: Kieron, you mentioned on Twitter recently that you were working in a bestiary for the RPG, a process you had been putting off due to not liking the concept. The story flows so smoothly that until you said that I hadn’t noticed the absence of that sort of RPG staple until you’d pointed it out. Did you face any challenges telling a story about an RPG without relying on the usual kinds of random encounters?

Gillen: Hah. True. Well, DIE is enormous and includes multitudes. I just wrote in the RPG manual that every game is canon. There’s every story in there, good and bad. That certainly includes random generation tables.

That said, there’s certainly some themes about randomness in DIE. The Fair’s determinism is an aggressive eyebrow-rise at that. There’s some ideas in the RPG which link to it, too – I paraphrase it down to that anything is a random generation table if you look at it right. I mean, I ran a DIE game whose encounters were generated by people randomly selecting things from an Italian Restaurant Takeaway menu.

Regarding the Bestiary, I like where we’ve ended up. The thing with bestiaries is that they’re meant to be interesting and fun and full of wonderful monsters. A “standard” bestiary for DIE would be things which you can subvert – as in, they need to be presented as vanilla as possible. The magic trick (and what excited me enough to write it all) is that in each entry we’re basically doing a beginner’s guide to deconstruction, so providing some filters and ideas to think about them, and provoke you to twist them. 

CXF: The style of the DIE gamebook is very natural and tongue-in-cheek, and often comes across as a lot funnier than the comic itself, and the general mood of the game. Was that dichotomy intentional, or accidental?

Gillen: One word: Beta. A lot is me writing an RPG and having fun with it, trying to get the ideas down and having fun sharing it.

A lot of that will change for the final release, where I’ll do more to suggest the core tone of the game. Things like (hopefully) having Stephanie Hans pages as play examples will also help, too. Having a set of DIE characters who run through all the examples in the book, and ground it in the fiction will work in a similar way.

That said, there’ll be a conversational tone in many places, too, especially in the supplementary material. I like RPG manuals which have a voice. A certain level of flair and playfulness makes a manual more easily digestible. The problem comes when the level of flair distracts from the game’s tone, buries the games’ rules or just expands it to a level where it’s far too long.

CXF: On a similar note, could you envision a way in which a mostly humorous take on the game itself would work while still staying true to the spirit?

Gillen: Have you watched the game I ran at Thought Bubble for Zdarsky, Matt Fraction, Emma Vieceli, Marguerite Bennett and Ed Brubaker? Yes, you can definitely run DIE funny. And also telling a bit too much truth about comics along the way.

I mean, I joke that DIE is just Goth Jumanji. You dial down the melodrama and horror, and you can just play it as something that lighthearted.

When I run DIE, my basal mode of play is a mixture of the hyperbolic ludicrous and the deeply grounded. I often have players laughing until they have tears, and then just having tears as they’re upset, occasionally from the same NPCs. This speaks to my aesthetic. In a real way, DIE is about how we choose to play games together. Whatever the group wants to do is fantastic.

CXF: Throughout DIE as a whole, from the comic to the gamebook, what is the pun that made you the most pleased with yourself?

Gillen: It’s a horror fantasy RPG comic called DIE, set on an enormous D20.

CXF: Thank you so much for your generosity, and for writing at such length (sincerely!).

Gillen: CAN’T WRITE AT ANY OTHER LENGTH.