Die #18 (July 14): Gillen is losing me quickly here, as we sink farther and farther into "pseudery" (to use his word).
I'm not necessarily opposed to the meta narrative becoming the core story, as it has over these last few issues. After all, it's pretty much the series' entire schtick. But, Gillen's implementation of this approach has left me unsure of what the story's stakes actually are at this point. After all, Gillen keeps telling us that the team's doomed. If we have no hope, why bother reading?
As they descend, the gang is surprised by how quiet the dungeon is. Gillen uses Ash to tell us that he's lifting directly from "The Return of the King," when the Fellowship arrives in Mordor and finds it empty. ("Just some friend walking in the dark...") At one point, Gillen appears to foreshadow a future event when Ash comments that she "didn't understand what it meant" when Matt looks at Molly after Angela finds a piece of Fair gold. But, I'm not sure what (or, again, if) he's foreshadowing.
The team enters a room that Sol doesn't remember, leading him to believe that they've arrived at the farthest point that he previously reached. They notice a sneaker print in some dust and some destroyed barricades. They then discover something that they all recognize: "A tomb. A book. A well." I had to Google that part to discover that it's the Chamber of Mazarbul from "Fellowship of the Rings." Although he initially doesn't remember it, Sol realizes that the book is his journal. Dun-dun-DUN.
As Sol reads the journal, we learn that the Grandmaster killed Sol when he pulled him from the circle. Since dead people can't vote, Sol can't go home. After killing Sol, the Grandmaster informs him that he's now the first of the Fallen and, until the next time he died, he has only a little of his "old power." Sol flees, but he's shunned in places like Angria and the Dreaming Lands, where he previously had friends. In his travels, he learns the heart of Die granting wishes, so he travels there, pursued by "them." Sol is the one who constructs the barricades, and "they" eventually overtake him. [It took me a while to understand this part, and I'm still not really sure if I'm supposed to recognize something about "them" (i.e., the monsters) given that we never really see them.]
At this point, Sol remembers everything. The Grandmaster awakens Sol in the tomb after he died (again) and removes his helmet to reveal his "head" is a glowing die. In fact, he is "Die," what Sol constructed.
This next part is when Gillen loses me, though I accept that he could have something up his sleeve. The Grandmaster asks Sol what he wants to do next (after having lost the game by dying), and Sol answers that he wants his friends to know that they left him. The Grandmaster informs him that he'll now have the Grandmaster's focus and power to lay the road to merge the two worlds to bring about his wish. Sol calls bullshit, since the Grandmaster can't just give him that power without a cost. We don't learn here what that cost is here.
What bothers me about this development is that we still don't know how Sol created Die. Or, put another way, we don't know how exactly Sol creating a RPG brought Die into existence. A previous issue said that "Die" was an ancient god sitting at the end of reality. Are we talking about some atemporal demons who seized upon Sol's game as a device to break down the boundaries between the two words? Or is Die itself the god? Either way, why did the demons and/or god seize on Sol's RPG? What made it special? At some point, Gillen really needs to explain how we got to this point.
Finishing his jounral, Sol laments to the team that he "killed" all those people in laying the road, though I'm not sure which people he means. Ash is right when she thinks about how Sol got trapped in a hell that turned all his best instincts against himself. She admits that she paused when it was her turn all those years ago to say, "The game is over." Sol doesn't know how to feel about that revelation. Chuck suggests what I'm thinking: that Sol kill Ash so that he can go home. Sol is torn. As he says, he's a 40-something corpse with no eyes or skills; he isn't wrong that he doesn't have the best future ahead of him back home.
Izzy asks Ash why she paused, and Gillen declines to give us the answer. Izzy recalls when Ash paused in Angria when they discussed leaving, and Ash admits that they need to gag her again because she doesn't know what she'd do to stop them from leaving this time. Suddenly, they hear a noise, and Sol tells the team to run so that they can get past "her" before she closes the "way," despite having just told Matt that he didn't know the way. They run and encounter a Phoenix-like Ash blocking said way.
Again, I'm at a loss here. I know from "Young Avengers" that Gillen is entirely capable of mesmerizing me with these last two issues now that we've fully fleshed out the stakes. But, I worry that we could descend even further into the sort of navel-gazing reflection on RPGs' nature that's dominated the last few issues at the story's expense. I hope not, but I have my doubts.
Undiscovered Country #14 (July 21): If this exchange doesn't whet your appetite for what exactly happened to Alaska, I don't know what will:
Ace: "You think...something ate Valentina?"
Sam: "Don't be dumb. This ain't Alaska."
In the meantime, we have the story at hand. This exchange happens when the team realizes that Valentina is gone. Sam expresses concern; he explains to the team that all the humans in Possibility left, leaving behind only their creations who'll be hungry for an audience. It explains the "noirs" from last issue and what we see here as Captain Flag and his team fight with each other over which one of them gets to "rescue" Valentina. Sam explains that the pair who set up Possibility created "anything engines" under the sea, allowing them to provide anything the "makers" needed. Before Sam can answer Ace's question about where everyone went, Buzz arrives at the ship and gives them Valentina's location. Sam explains that she's in the Universes, the island where comic-book characters live.
On the Universes, Valentina is hiding in a room when she realizes that Captain Flag and his companions are machines stuck on a loop. Since they need to save her (since she's a victim), she's pretty sure that they're going to kill her inadvertently. She realizes that she could be something else and uses Buzz's holographic abilities to become Captain Valentine, the superhero she created when she was younger. When the robots break into the room, she tells them that she's a super-villain with mind-control powers and orders them to kill each other. Thrilled to have a new story, they do. Well played, Valentina.
Later, on the ship, Valentina tells Ace her story and asks his plans. He's decided that the quintessential American story is the rags-to-riches one, so he decides that they're heading to Loreville.
All in all, it's a pretty straight-forward issue for this title. My only real question is that we see, in one of the flashbacks, Valentina's mother chastising her for reading comics because she needs help at the bakery she owns. This woman is very, very different from the one that we've previously seen as Valentina's mother, so I wonder where Snyder and Soule are going with her character. Vamos a ver.
Also Read: Six Sidekicks of Trigger Keaton #2 (July 14)
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