It’s Rivendell meets Casablanca, Oz in No Man’s Land, wrapped up safe in its indestructible snowglobe…
…It only gets more ominous as we get closer…
Keep reading for a review of Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’ Die #4.
The way I see it, the first issue was where We Meet Our Heroes in the Old World. The second was where we Get To Know Our Heroes in the New World. The third was Where We Learn More About the How Bad Things Are.
That means this issue is Where Our Heroes Catch A Frigging Break.
Because in a lot of stories, we like to see our heroes relax, even for a minute. When Frodo is recuperating in Rivendell, when Malcolm and the Serenity crew are hiding on Haven, when they find the well-stocked bunker in The Road, when the West Wing staff are eating Chinese food and writing jokes while Toby’s finding out president has MS…any time you have a break in between horrible things, where the heroes can drink the local beverage and rest and tell stories, that’s what this issue is about.
They’re not always happy stories, of course. A dwarf tells one about a wizard who loses a memory with every spell, and the Grief Knight talks about bravery in the face of total terror. We start to hear a story from Ash that could clear up a question about their gender preferences, but we hear a little of the Neo’s story instead, just enough to break our hearts. (But in a good way, kind of.)
We also get half a story about the question I had last issue, “what does the Godbinder have to do when she owes her gods a favor?” The answer is: whatever they want her to do. There’s no set pay structure, they’ll just stop helping her if they think she owes them too much. Or if they just don’t want to. Messing around with gods is tricky.
I felt that her payment this issue was glossed over a little. I don’t want to spoil it, but imagine the type of stuff you wrote in junior high, especially if you were feeling bad. Now imagine what a god might do with that. I wanted to see a little more of how that felt, exactly, in cringe-worthy detail. I feel like we’ll hear a lot more of that story later.
But like a lot of stories, the peace doesn’t last. Everyone thinks how neat it’d be to Stay Here Forever, but they can’t because It Doesn’t Work that Way. And the beautiful Glass Town they’re in is more than just a storytelling trope, it turns out to be important for other reasons: since Sol, the Grandmaster, is most likely toying with them, they may be able to use the city to their advantage.
As for the art, in every Stephanie Hans issue there are always going to be a few panels that are my favorites, and in this one they were the first view of Glass Town, the panel of Ash suggesting they get sloshed, the Neo’s face when she was snarling at The Fool, and the final panel. Beautiful, beautiful stuff.
