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Die #10 - "The X-Card"
Jan. 3rd, 2021 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
laughing_tree
I suspect you can guess someone's aesthetics depending on how they respond to: "Do you like Cersei in Game of Thrones?" I'm sure you know my answer. -- Kieron Gillen
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laughing_treeI suspect you can guess someone's aesthetics depending on how they respond to: "Do you like Cersei in Game of Thrones?" I'm sure you know my answer. -- Kieron Gillen
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Die #9 - "Self-Insert"
Feb. 8th, 2020 12:44 amlaughing_tree
I use the Goth Jumanji line as it's the simplest way to describe it before it's released, but when it's out, people will see how much is in there. Yes, it's an intense, adult drama about six people. It's also a metafantasy about the development of the genre, ala Planetary. It's also a riposte to the middle-age-spread of geek nostalgia culture. It's a whole lot. -- Kieron Gillen
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Die #8 - "Legacy Heroes"
Nov. 4th, 2019 09:45 pmlaughing_tree
Kurt Busiek argued that a core part of superheroes is that you introduce this sense of the fantastic into the modern world, and it basically changes nothing. The point of Spider-Man is that he could swing past your window. If you change the world, you rapidly segue into something that's speculative fiction. Equally, the classical D&D games posit that you can introduce huge technological and sociological changes, and still have basically a quasi-medieval world.
If you know RPGs, you're howling exceptions. Just go with me.
Trying to balance the two contrasting elements of RPGs in DIE was the battle - one is about 'Anything Can Happen In This Dungeon!' and the other is about what emerges from modelled systems. As in, messy fiction versus pure rules.
-- Kieron Gillen
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Die #7 - "Wisdom Check"
Oct. 7th, 2019 09:10 pmlaughing_tree
Are you aware of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace? Cult 00s British comedy about a writer's 1980s hospital-set horror show, framed with 00s-period talking heads. Coiner of memorable phrases such as "I've met writers who use subtext and they're all cowards." Also, too close to home for almost everyone I know in this biz. We're all one bad day away from being Garth Marenghi. Chuck had his bad days a long time ago, and he's lost in his personal Darkplace. -- Kieron Gillen
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Die #6 - "The Grind"
Sep. 7th, 2019 09:21 pmlaughing_tree
This was before EA Spouse (yes, google that) and semi-regular exposes of industry practices, followed by public industry decrying of such counter-productive methods before slinking back to something like business as usual. I simplify but less than you’d hope. There’s some companies so tone-deaf as to boast about how inefficient and brutal their processes are. The sad thing is that players (generally) don’t care. Or don’t care enough to actually not buy, which is kind of worse than not caring at all. […] DIE is partially about what people are willing to do to other people to get the fantasy they crave. That doesn’t just happen in the fantasy worlds. -- Kieron Gillen
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Die, Vol. 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker
May. 12th, 2019 11:34 pmlaughing_tree
Like the thing about geek culture winning is that there’s still that awful geek defensiveness. We don’t need to have that anymore. We can be grown-up and talk about the downside, about how this stuff has affected our lives, sometimes in a negative way. DIE! is a serious conversation about what fantasy is for, and how it has the power to make us better and the power to make us worse. -- Kieron Gillen
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Die #5 - "Premise Rejection"
May. 6th, 2019 02:37 amlaughing_tree
The title is a nod to Robin D. Laws' phrase, used to describe when a group of players explicitly reject the concept of the game. The players don't want to take the ring to Mordor. The players want to bum around Hobbiton and hit on Rosie. This is closely linked to another concept -- namely, a failure to get "Buy In". Buy in signals to a group the game we're going to be playing, and asks them to enter a social contract to do that. If you're playing a game of heroic adventure, you play heroic adventurers. If you don't want to be a heroic adventurer, we play a different game. There's philosophies that reject this, of course, which leans towards the idea of complete player agency and a pure sandbox experience. -- Kieron Gillen
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Die #4 - "The Inn"
Apr. 6th, 2019 11:29 pmlaughing_tree
The push and pull of escapism is right at the heart of DIE, for better for worse. There's a great quote from Tolkien which I'm sure I'm going to use at some point, about those who critique escapism confusing a deserter's escape from a prisoner's. -- Kieron Gillen
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Die #3 - "Dungeons"
Mar. 7th, 2019 09:34 amlaughing_tree
One of Jamie McKelvie's favorite stories about me is the time I explained, at length, that elves were basically "what if there actually was a master race" racial supremacists to a group of people cosplaying Tolkien elves. I'm annoyed at the Know Your Place implicit in Middle-earth, the hatred of the industrial world and the working class who inhabit it. My standard line is "If I was in Middle-earth, I would clearly be an orc" and I still believe that.
But feel the simmering resentment there. I quickly realize why. I came to comics as an adult. As such, my comic influences are all adult influences. I'm chill about them. Conversely, Tolkien was what got me into this world. He's the father figure I have oedipal rage towards.
As such, the research [for DIE] was my process of forgiving Tolkien.
-- Kieron Gillen
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Die #2 - "Players"
Feb. 6th, 2019 06:41 amlaughing_tree
I wanted to be deconstructionary (As in, the world takes apart some common RPG tropes) while also reconstructionary (As in, creating a whole fantasy that is seductive and enchanting). I wanted character types that could be commentary on your cleric and paladin and the rest... while having the potential to operate by themselves as their own iconic sense. -- Kieron Gillen
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Die #1 - "The Party"
Jan. 4th, 2019 02:36 amlaughing_tree
It's very much the sort of book I can only do at Image, which tries to do everything. As well as this personal story around the cast, the whole thing basically is a Planetary-but-for-Fantasy-and-RPG deconstruction of the various elements that gave birth to the modern conception of games and fantasy. And as well as that, it's also an entirely coherent, and hopefully enchanting fantasy world summoned by Stephanie [Hans]. It's a lot. It doesn't aim low. -- Kieron Gillen
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laughing_tree
The other aspect I’ll front load here is while this is one of the most famously re-told evenings in literary history (it’s almost JFK-assassination level in terms of over-done-ness) that the stories always seem to lean on Byron and Percy Shelley. That seems fucking bizarre. It’s literally Mary Shelley’s story. Only one person made herself immortal that night, and did so in a way which seems more and more important as time goes by. The more research I did, the less interested I was in with Byron and Percy and the more I was with Mary and Claire [Clairemont]. As far as I was concerned, everyone else is a bit player. -- Kieron Gillen
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Marvel June 2017: Mary Jane Variant Month
Apr. 27th, 2017 08:29 pmlordultimusDon't think anyone's posted anything about this before, so here you go.
So much like the Gwen Stacy covers of June 2015, Marvel is publishing variants which place Mary Jane Watson in the place of various Marvel heroes this June, coinciding with the first issue of Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man.
The first announcement can be found here. More covers have since been released, though I don't think they've completed the set. I posted my favorites of the ones I found behind the cut.
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So much like the Gwen Stacy covers of June 2015, Marvel is publishing variants which place Mary Jane Watson in the place of various Marvel heroes this June, coinciding with the first issue of Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man.
The first announcement can be found here. More covers have since been released, though I don't think they've completed the set. I posted my favorites of the ones I found behind the cut.
( Read more... )
Angela: Queen of Hel #1
Dec. 13th, 2015 11:06 amhistory79
"We're going to go back and forth in Sera and Angela's stories, and you're going to see parts of their younger days, together and apart. You're going to see parts with them traveling together before Sera's original death."
- Marguerite Bennett
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laughing_tree
'Both Marguerite and I are big fans of the real world period and Neil Gaiman. So the idea of me doing Gaiman style material is not exactly a new riff. "Journey Into Mystery" very much could be read as dancing with "The Sandman." In fact there are explicit sections of "Journey Into Mystery" that are engaged with "The Sandman." My Nightmare was sort of explicitly a "Sandman" piss take. I say that with love.' -- Kieron Gillen
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laughing_tree
'I must admit the biggest influences on my stuff in this outside of [the original] "1602" is the second series of "Blackadder." This is basically the Elizabethan era of "Blackadder" and that's a very broad comedy. To me, that's when "Blackadder" got good. It's a brutally scathing pastiche of everything Elizabethan. There's a character called Flashheart and my Angela sort of enters the story like Flashheart does.' -- Kieron Gillen
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superboyprime
"Marguerite and I both have terrible literary and historical fancy-pants tendencies, so playing games with the period is fun, in the ultimate mash-up between early-Jacobean and the Marvel Universe way. Plus, with the added Gaiman-ness, we get to play some games with that as well." - Kieron Gillen
Enter the region of Battleworld known as... KING JAMES' ENGLAND.
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Angela: Asgard's Assassin #6
Jun. 14th, 2015 09:06 amlaughing_tree
'[Her new costume] is completely different from everyone else's costume reworking at the moment. We're not really working with the kind of, "I'm going to take a selfie"-style character. Our character is more, "I'm on stage and I'm going to play guitar with David Bowie." She's pure glam-metal.' -- Kieron Gillen
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