H.P. Lovecraft appears as the ‘big reveal’ at the end of the recently-released serial comic Die #16, and now makes a sustained as-character appearance in the current issue #17. Die is based on a popular RPG game, it seems.
In the comic he is deemed to have died in 1919, after blinding himself because of the horrors he was seeing and learning about. He is here the blind ‘Master of Dreams’ who serves as brief ‘realm-guide and info-dump’ for the super-hero-like RPG team. I say brief, but he appears for 14 pages, which all look superb and are kind of fun. Lovecraft is then rewarded by the team by being easily killed with a single head-bash, because he is “no longer needed” (no… I couldn’t figure that bit out, either…). His death (again) unleashes his hordes of nightmare creature-dreams on his dream-realm and thus on the team. Moral: ‘Don’t kill the Master, because it will unleash his horrors’, I guess.
But then the team just teleport away from the monsters (erm… Wellsian centipedes?) and the brained Lovecraft. Which was rather lame, I thought. Die has superb art and interesting fantasy-horror concepts going on, but possibly some too-easy get-outs. But perhaps that’s the way it is in the table-top RPG version of Die. Don’t like a NPC character? Just kill him off… In trouble? Just teleport away…
I guess now we wait for the trade-paperback for this Die story-arc to see how it all plays out and if it makes sense when read in full. The trade is due early November as Die, Volume 4: Bleed, with 168 pages.
