Current Comics  > July 2018  > Image

Die! Die! Die! #1


Die! Die! Die! #1 Die! Die! Die! #1 Die! Die! Die! #1 Die! Die! Die! #1

Die! Die! Die! #1 back

Robert Kirkman, Scott M. Gimple & Chris Burnham

Price: 
£3.25

Please note: single issues move so fast we can’t guarantee this item is in stock at any given time. But if we don't have a copy we will immediately back order it for you.

Back orders, for items which are in print and available, will typically arrive at Page 45 within 1 week if the UK distributor has stock, or 3 to 4 weeks if they need to request it from the US distributor's warehouse or the publisher.

Please note, we do NOT guarantee first printings. If you are speculating on 'hot' titles and want multiple first print copies of comics we probably don't have left in stock, please just don't bother ordering. Comics should be for reading...

Any questions, call 0115 9508045 or email page45@page45.com. For info on Standing Orders, the best way to make sure you get EXACTLY what you want, click here.

Stephen

"She was nineteen."
"That's funny. I said that with a different tone as a defence."

Oh, how I wish I could quote you the three preceding sentences in that exchange, but we don't use those words around here!

As the cover may suggest ("I'm Paul." "I'm Nate." "I'm drunk.") this is all very Warren Ellis (think INJECTION), and a tremendously funny first issue from the writer of THE WALKING DEAD comic, the showrunner of 'The Walking Dead' TV series Seasons 4 to 8 who left to co-write this, and the artist on Grant Morrison's NAMELESS.

It was also a massive surprise because it arrived on our shelves last Wednesday, unannounced, without us having even ordered it because it was never solicited in PREVIEWS!

The idea behind that - which I wholeheartedly applaud, along with its successfully clandestine execution - was to make visiting comic shops exciting again. As Kirkman has written, there is so much information on the internet now that a comic series can be announced up to a year before its publication and that's a long time to sustain any interest. Instead, here you go - BOOM!

We begin in Shrewsbury at the greyhound races, with an elderly man dropping his betting ticket. A younger, pretty bloke picks it up off the floor, handing it back to grateful gentlemen. Only, it isn't the one which the pensioner dropped. It's just as well, because he'd have lost his bet, having backed the wrong horse.

Instead he's won, big-time.

Believe it or not, that's merely one nudge in a ridiculously elaborate ruse formulated by the woman at the bottom of the cover, a US Senator, to completely ruin then murder a British Member of Parliament and Cabinet Minister without drawing too much attention to it. The murder, I mean. She wants him well ruined first, and in public, for he's a paedophile. She's snorting cocaine at midnight after what must have been a most excellent night of sex if the pert pair of bare buttocks on her sofa is anything to go by, and, as she does so, she reveals in the intricacies of her plan in minute, carefully calculated detail, including the permutations which wouldn't quite work and so were shelved. A key element was that the old codger at the race track, no relation to the MP whatsoever, needed to become exceedingly wealthy.

The Senator, you see, is running an organisation within the United States government which is as covert as the operation required to get DIE! DIE! DIE! so secretly onto our shelves.

Unfortunately her plan begins to unravel in the Shropshire countryside on the very second page as the pretty young man speeds through the rural idyll on a motorbike, only to be pursued by a Landrover whose driver displays all the Highway Code courtesy of a BMW tail-gater. (Which is a tautology, I know.)

The breezy self-confidence and acrobatic, pugilistic prowess of our secret agent is such that you know full well how that's going to pan out, but the writers are no more slacking throughout than the line and colour artist. They deliver a dry-stone English B-road to die for / beside, and some crotch-ripping high kicks to make you thank goodness for stretchable fabrics.

Cracking final-page cliffhanger, craftily set up well in advance as to provide an immaculate three-beat punchline.

I'm sorry...? Very much recommended, to adults only, yes.

spacer