The Golden Mean

 
The Golden Mean

In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin and Sabine Concludes
by Nick Bantock

Chronicle Books

1993

 

 

The Golden Mean is the last book in Nick Bantock's original trilogy of epistolary art books about the long-distance romance between Griffin and Sabine. 
 
The series started with British artist Griffin Moss receiving a homemade postcard from a woman he never met, Sabine Strohem, who lives on a South Pacific island. He replied back with a homemade card of his own, and soon they both found they were falling in love. Sabine is also an artist; she designs stamps for the island government. And she has a psychic connection to Griffin, which is why she contacted him initially.
 
Then Sabine decided to fly to London to visit Griffin. Faced with the prospect of meeting his penpal dreamgirl in real life, Griffin panicked and went on a trip around the world to find himself. Sabine stayed in Griffin's loft, and they continued trading postcards and letters. Sabine would have to go back to the island soon, so Griffin plucked up his courage and came home, only to find his loft empty... Strangely, the date on Sabine's last card sent from London suggests the overlapped by a week without seeing each other.
 
The Golden Mean leans a bit more into the supernatural elements of the story. Griffin finally develops a psychic connection back to Sabine, just as hers to him starts mysterious waning. They wonder if they're living on parallel worlds, or what else it could be. (Normally I might refer to this as a Lake House plot, except Bantock wrote this over a decade before The Lake House!) A menacing man starts following Sabine around the island, claiming to be a scientist who studies psychics, who wants to examine her and Griffin. The strange man starts writing postcards to Griffin too. Sabine and Griffin know they need to meet, and to escape the scientist, so they agree to find each other at the Pharaoh's Gate in Egypt. 
 
Later, an African doctor gets a mysterious postcard from Sabine that suggests she and Griffin have married and had a child...
 
Although The Golden Mean concludes the trilogy, it's clear there's more story ahead! As usual, Bantock infuses the postcards and letters with the characters' personalities. Griffin's cards are more surreal, and his handwriting is neat and precise. He types his letter. Sabine's cards use more collage, she handwrites everything in cursive in what looks like fountain pen ink. The mysterious stranger uses Sabine-designed stamps, but his postcards are store-bought unlike the ones the penpals make for each other. I suppose I'll continue reading to learn what happens next!

Paper Girls 3

 
Paper Girls 3

by Brian Vaughan

art by Cliff Chiang

Image Comics

2017 
 
 
In the third volume of Brian Vaughan and Cliff Chiang's Paper Girls comic, the girls find themselves 10,000 years in the past, where they meet a cavegirl their own age, and the first person to ever travel through time, a woman scientist born in the 2010s. 
 
Much to the scientist's horror, her maiden voyage is to a past already despoiled by travelers from further in the future. Not only are teen girls from the 1980s already there when she first arrives, but a trio of menacing cavemen (collectively, the fathers of the cavegirl's infant child) are wearing space helmets and are using the Playstation controller button symbols to decorate themselves.

In Paper Girls volume 1, we first met the girls as they met up in their Cleveland suburb to ride their paper routes together, the morning after Halloween in the late 1980s. New kid Erin was introduced to KJ, Tiffany, and tough-girl Mac, who's kind of the group leader. Weird things started happening! Everyone else was frozen in place, and then started disappearing, with only the paper girls unaffected. White knights riding pterodactyls patrolled the skies, and a small gang of black-clad teenagers from the far future ran around looking for things to steal. When the teens' time machine exploded, the paper girls were accidentally sent to the 2010s.
 
Luckily, in volume 2, the first person they met was a middle-aged Erin, who took them in until they could figure out what's going on. Another future teen, this one a clone of Erin arrived, and accidentally brought some giant tardigrades through time with her. The tardigrades started wrecking up downtown Cleveland, which caught the attention of the time traveling pterodactyl knights. The knights are led by an old hippie who operates out of a giant airship cathedral. 
 
Dramatic as they look, they seem to be trying to prevent changes to history. The heavy-handed tactic of putting every potential witness into some kind of temporary stasis seems to be in service of that goal. We don't know why the girls aren't affected, about Erin's clone suggested the reason she is a clone is so she could piggyback off of whatever's protecting Erin. While the airship and flying knights fought a city-destroying tardigrade, the girls fell through a hole in time created by all the disturbances.
 
Now in volume 3, we don't see either of the warring factions at all, we just see hints of how much they've time traveled based on the apparent changes to the prehistoric past. The girls get separated, with Erin and Tiffany meeting the cavegirl and then the time traveling scientist. KJ and Mac encounter a strange creature that looks like an inverted pyramid with tentacles. KJ touches it, and sees visions of her future, including her and Mac kissing, which troubles her, because she didn't realize she likes girls, and Mac is vocally homophobic. (Mac is also dying - in the 2010s she learned she has leukemia and only a couple years to live. She's trying to act tougher than usual to cover her fear.) 
 
KJ is slightly able to play off her sudden awkwardness as being caused by getting her first ever period while trapped in the Stone Age, although Mac, who's never had any sex ed because her Catholic family disapproves, is super curious. They manage to reunite with the others, agree to protect the cavegirl from the trio of cavemen, and agree to help the scientist get back to her time machine, which Mac and KJ saw earlier. Things don't go as planned! In the end, the time machine leaves on autopilot without the scientist, and the paper girls get caught up in it's wake and transported somewhere new.

The Last Human Job

 
 
The Last Human Job
The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World

by Allison Pugh

Princeton University Press

2024

 

 

The Last Human Job is social theory that's deeply grounded in interviews and ethnographic research that author Allison Pugh conducted with people in a wide variety of caregiving professions, including hair dressers, home health aides, teachers, chaplains, and medical doctors. Pugh has two goals - first to name and describe the work of making an authentic connection with another person, and second to show how this necessary labor (and the workers who do it) are being degraded by various attempts to accelerate and automate it.
 
Pugh identifies what she calls connective labor, which is work we do while interacting with another person. It's the work of listening to them and responding back to them so that they feel understood, they feel seen. Care work often requires connective labor as part of the job - but so do lots of other kinds of work too. Pugh thinks we often fail to recognize this as a kind of work, and she thinks that for many jobs, how well the worker can connect with the client determines how well the actual job will go. A good hairdresser, for example, isn't just good at styling hair, but at knowing how each person wants their hair to be styled, understanding how they wants others to see them. For some jobs, the 'real' work can't happen at all unless the worker can make a connection first. 
 
For one person to see another can sometimes be a powerful, profound experience, for both of them. It can also be draining for the worker. Jobs that require connective labor often have high rates of burnout. People probably vary in their innate talent for making connections, but Pugh thinks it's also a skill that can be learned, practiced, and improved on. Ultimately Pugh thinks that it's the organization of the workplace, much more so than the qualities of the individual worker, that determine whether they are able to successfully connect with their clients, and whether they can do so consistently and sustainably, without using themselves up. 
 
Pugh identifies three characteristics of workplaces that make it possible for workers to successfully provide connective labor to clients. First, they're set up so that workers are supported by leaders and supervisors who believe in the value of connection, mentors who can help them learn what to do, and peers who can act as sounding boards. To keep doing this kind of work, people need advice, encouragement, the ability to admit mistakes and learn from them. Second, workplaces support connective labor by making relationships an official priority. They recognize that they need to make a connection first, before they can do their 'real' work.Third, they support this work with resources - enough workers to meet client demand and enough time with each client to do the job well.
 
That last requirement gets at the heart of what Pugh thinks is the biggest threat to our collective ability to connect with one another. Connective labor often costs too much for the people who need it most to afford it, it pays too little for many of the workers to keep at it. There is too much work to be done, too many people in need, and not enough staff or time to do it all. And meanwhile workers are under constant pressure to see more people, spend less time with them, do the job faster, get more done, to do it without actually connecting at all. Collectively, these pressures threaten to reserve high-quality connective labor for the rich, while everyone else gets worsening service. And the worse the service becomes, the more tempting it is to replace it with some form of automation.
 
Pugh finds a few really common arrangements for workplaces that deliver connective labor to clients. There are mission-driven facilities located in poor areas, where staff are called on to be heroes, and there's always a backlog of unmet need. Workers here are often able to connect well, but become burned out from simply having to do too much, for too long each day. Corporate facilities have more resources and allow workers to have a home-life separate from their work, but they schedule lots of very short appointments. Workers are still overworked, and they're denied the ability to make meaningful connections. The personal service model is a luxury for the well-off. Workers have time and resources, but get treated like servants, and often feel bad about the people who can't afford their help. Set-ups that provide concierge-level resources to workplaces that serve the neediest people do exist, but they're much rarer.
 
From the outside, it seems like there wouldn't be quite so much unmet need if we didn't organize this work in such a way that it continuously burns people out and uses them up. I have to suspect that people vary somewhat in their need for connective labor. We might not be able to give everyone the concierge treatment, but not everyone needs it. But also, the people who need it most are probably the least able to afford it. Again from the outside, government funding seems like the obvious solution to this mismatch. Especially because programs like housing-first approaches to homelessness, or assigning care coordinators to patients with complex conditions, or experiments with unconditional basic income always produce better results and cost less long-term than the way we usually do things.
 
The threat to connective labor comes primarily from corporations, governments, and other leaders who all want to find ways to spend less money on it. Inevitably, these plans involve some form of automation. By automation, Pugh does not primarily mean things like replacing therapists with genAI chatbots - although she does explicitly consider that companies might try to deprive poorer clients of any human contact at all. Automation here refers to any attempt to use technology or organization to divide work into smaller components so that they can be performed more efficiently. Pugh argues that leaders are currently trying to do to care work and connective labor what the Industrial Revolution and the assembly line did for manufacturing.
 
Automation promises to save workers from burnout by helping them work more efficiently, but mostly worsens it by raising expectations for how much they should be able to do while draining their work of autonomy and meaning - the things that make it satisfying. And despite their promises, automation schemes often actually add tasks and take more time - but that time is moved away from clients and onto the work of following and documenting the automation protocols.
 
The most common forms of automation for this kind of work are scripting and counting. By scripting, Pugh means a whole variety of ways that work can be standardized by employing scripts, templates, manuals, checklists, flowcharts, etc. The goal is to make it go faster by making it go the same way every time (this is also a hedge against incomplete or low-quality interactions). But of course clients' lives and problems aren't scripted, and might need more time or a different approach than has been allotted to them. 
 
Counting refers to various forms of data collection. It's meant to track what's being done (especially useful for billing purposes) and to demonstrate that it's being done well. Customer satisfaction surveys and standardized tests for students are two common examples. Counting imposes its own problems - it's time consuming, it can focus attention away from things that are important but difficult to quantify, and it tempts workers and bosses alike to focus on getting the right number rather than doing whatever the number is supposed to represent.
 
The social theories we use as the basis of sociology were all about changes in the way people interact, know each other, and form communities in the wake of mass urbanization as people moved into cities, and about the ways they were affected by industrialization and the reorganization of work. Pugh is very much addressing those same topics, as they are relevant in the contemporary context.

The Tea Dragon Tapestry

 
 
The Tea Dragon Tapestry

by K O'Neill

Oni Press

2021

 

  

The Tea Dragon Tapestry is the third and last of K O'Neill's tea dragon books. O'Neill has grown quite notably as an artist and a storyteller across the trilogy, and I think this is their best work. Tapestry is a direct sequel to the original Tea Dragon Society, although these's a brief cameo by a couple characters introduced in the prequel Tea Dragon Festival.

 

In each of the the tea dragon books, O'Neill pairs someone who's young and getting ready to move into a more professional stage of life with someone who's burned out from too much work, who's trying to heal and reconnect with themselves. O'Neill sees friendships between these two types of people as mutually beneficial, the younger one reminding the older of what they used to be like, the older one helping the younger navigate the confusing first steps of a career. The fussy little tea dragons play a role in this relationship by forcing both parties to get out of their own heads, to engage with the world, and to take care of something that needs them.

 

In Tapestry, we rejoin Greta who wants to be a blacksmith and Minette who used to be a prophet and now works in a tea shop. Greta has learned blacksmithing from her mother and gotten pretty good. She's ready for a new teacher to help her continue to grow. One of the retired adventurers who runs the tea shop sent one of Greta's spoons to the master blacksmith who used to make their adventuring swords. Now he's come to town to test Greta to see if she's ready.

 

Minette found a tapestry she started but never finished when she was a prophet, and starts having strange, symbolic dreams. I think probably for anyone who's had one career, and had to leave it, there's a sense of shame or failure around what you left behind and why you left it. Minette's task will be to accept that chapter of her life, and to recognize that she's happy where she is now, that she has friends, community.

 

Greta needs to decide what to make to demonstrate her skill. She's also worried about her tea dragon, Ginseng, who is not actually fussy, but instead in mourning after the death (from old age) of its previous caretaker. Meanwhile, the master blacksmith reveals to his old friends the tea shop owners that he's been burned out at work, hasn't taken a new student in awhile, and is thinking of just shutting down his forge. For the test, Greta makes a present for Ginseng to let it know she'll wait as long as it needs to recover from its grief. The gift also touches the heart of the master blacksmith, who sees something he hadn't thought of before, and feels inspired to keep smithing. He also decides that, instead of asking Greta to return to his forge, he'll settle here for awhile and reconnect with his old friends.

 

Across all three books, O'Neill has offered a defense of working slowly, making things of quality, making time to spend with friends and pets, and being patient with oneself because all these things take time. This isn't just a list of different tasks; O'Neill clearly sees them as interconnected. Artisan work is a way to avoid burnout, because it's a way of working that lets you savor what you like about your job without using you up. New friendships need not only be with people at the same stage of life, but can be between people who are in some sort of transition, and can support each other, no matter what they're moving from or to. And as I said, that thesis is expressed more clearly in Tea Dragon Tapestry than I think it has been before.

The Case of the Missing Men

 
The Case of the Missing Men
Hobtown Mystery Stories 1

by Kris Bertin
art by Alexander Forbes

Conundrum Press

2017 

 

 

The Case of the Missing Men is the first of what promises to be a series of Hobtown Mystery Stories, set in a very small fictional town in Nova Scotia. This is a graphic novel with black and white pen drawings. The backgrounds and scenery are quite detailed and realistic. The people are drawn in a way that shows all their human imperfections, especially on people who are dirty, injured, or have been shaped by a harsh life. The mystery here starts out like a typical case for teen sleuths, but very quickly becomes stranger and darker, so that by the end it feels more like a horror story.
 
The book's trade dress is clearly a homage to the Nancy Drew books, and the leader of Hobtown's after-school mystery solving club is a logical, confident blond girl named Dana Nance, who I think is supposed to remind us of Nancy Drew, even if she's not a direct stand-in. The other club members are non-identical twin brothers Denny and Brennan, who might be reminiscent of the Hardy Boys, and Pauline, who is intuitive, maybe psychic, and who doesn't seem to have a direct teen detective inspiration that I'm aware of. The case starts because new kid in town Sam is looking for his missing father. Sam and his dad look a lot like Johnny Quest and Mr Quest. I could be wrong though - the twins also remind me of the twin brothers in A Wrinkle in Time, Sam might be meant to evoke Tom Swift, or each could combine several inspirations, or what I think is a pattern might be a coincidence.
 
Dana and her friends meet Sam when she's assigned to be his study partner at school. Sam's been skipping class and acting out because he's stuck in a town he doesn't live in, his dad's been missing for weeks, and the local police don't seem to care. Dana and the others do care, especially when they learn that several other men have gone missing, though the others are from the margins of society, and Sam's dad is the wealthy owner of an aviation company. They check around town, looking into the last places the men were seen, while repeatedly being warned off by the police and Dana's dad. Then a teacher is murdered at school in the middle of the day, and the search uncovers the hidden corpse of a town councilwoman.
 
What started out seemingly straight forward keeps getting weirder and weirder. The teens spot some of the missing men, but their behavior is feral, inhuman. The solution to the mystery turns out to involve two separate groups committing murders, for reasons that reach deep into the town's history, with a number of prominent people implicated. The pace of revelation is good - the things we learn are strange, some are even supernatural, but each discovery helps things make more sense instead of becoming more confusing. What we learn is really dark, involving not only kidnapping and murder but also torture and brainwashing. By the end, the teens have learned some very heavy, adult stuff. This is not the sort of story where everything is okay at the end.
 
One story-telling device I'd like to note is that at a couple key points in the book, we switch from closely following the teens in linear time to a more distant perspective, with events related in flashback and under police questioning. The discovery of the hidden body, and later catching one murderer in the act are both depicted this way. The effect is like a chorus of narrators, with these important moments shown through a kaleidoscope of viewpoints - in fragments, from many angles. 

Two Serious Ladies

 
Two Serious Ladies

by Jane Bowles

Ecco

1943, reprinted 2014 
 
 
Two Serious Ladies was originally published in the 1940s, and has been kept alive since then by what appears to be a mix of historical curiosity and truly passionate fandom. From a historical standpoint, author Jane Bowles' husband Paul was an author and composer. I'd never heard of him, but apparently he's moderately famous in the literary world - he was friends with Gertrude Stein and her circle, one of his novels has been made into a movie, etc. So for someone interested in Paul Bowles specifically, or that literary milieu more generally, reading Two Serious Ladies could provide some extra context.
 
I don't remember exactly how I found the book, but it must've been a tip from a true fan. If you go looking for Two Serious Ladies online, you won't find a lot of stand alone reviews, but it shows up over and over in lists of recommended titles. Its cult following seems to be large enough that if you go looking for someone to tell you about their lesser-known faves, you're sure to find somebody trying to press a copy into your hand - especially if you're interested in "forgotten" women authors or books about women living unconventional lives. It was an interesting read for me, but I won't be counting myself among its evangels.
 
Two Serious Ladies follows two middle-aged women, Miss Goering and Mrs Copperfield, who are acquaintances but not friends in the same set of New York WASPs, as they each spontaneously and independently embark on a personal experiment to live differently, no longer bound by tradition or the norms for women of their social class. 
 
The first chapter introduces us to Miss Goering, who lives alone in a big Victorian mansion. The sister of her childhood nanny shows up one day, they get along well, and Miss Goering invites her to move in. Later she goes to a party, briefly chats with Mrs Copperfield, and allows herself to get picked up by a guy who still lives with his elderly parents.

In chapter 2, we follow Mrs Copperfield on vacation to Panama with her husband. (I'll admit this caught me by surprise; I'd presumed the new housemate was the second serious lady, and that we'd continue following the characters we'd been properly introduced to.) Mrs Copperfield is very anxious, and doesn't seem to enjoy going outside or being on vacation, while her husband is very energetic, wants to walk the whole city and then hike the jungles, and basically ignores his wife's discomfort. While he's out exploring, she ends up in a hotel in the red light district, where she befriends the elderly madame and one of the young prostitutes. She keep staying there even after her husband comes back, and tells him to leave without her at the end of the trip.
 
In chapter 3, we return to Miss Goering. She's abandoned her big house in the city and moved into a shack outside a small town on one of the islands near New York. Her housemate and the guy she met at the party live with her, though they both seem unhappy about it. The guy's dad abandons the city to move in with them too. Miss Goering takes a ferry to a slightly larger town, meets a guy loitering on the street, goes drinking with him, and then comes back the next day to move in with him. Her other housemates are pretty shocked that she's leaving them. She lives with the guy for a week, then dumps him in favor of a gangster, who presumes she's a prostitute. The gangster takes her home with him, then out to a nice restaurant where he has a business meeting.
 
While Miss Goering is bored at the restaurant, she calls Mrs Copperfield, who is coincidentally back from her trip for a few days, with her new prostitute friend tagging along, before moving back to Panama permanently. Mrs Copperfield shows up at the restaurant wildly drunk with her friend in tow. Miss Goering is appalled by her, and then the gangster leaves to go do business, abandoning her. The end.
 
The plot of the book is very odd, because neither Miss Goering nor Mrs Copperfield seem to be acting on any kind of plan or ideology. They each have an inchoate sense of wanting to do something different, and enough money to basically do whatever they want, and so they both advance toward their unseen goals over the objections of the people around them. 
 
Most of what happens is just people talking, just chitchatting, or talking about how they live or what they want to do, or trying to convince someone to go into business or on a date. It all seems pretty prosaic, not like anyone is the embodiment of any particular viewpoint. Our two serious ladies listen, then say vague things about how they think it's nice to do this, or they don't want to do that. They're impervious to persuasion or browbeating. But they don't really espouse any viewpoint of their own. If there's a genuine philosophical argument about how to live hidden in this dialogue, it's couched in terms we might think of as vaguebooking or subtweeting. I'm not sure it's there at all. Also everyone in the book drinks heavily, pretty much constantly. A lot of the dialogue sounds like what you'd hear a bar.
 
Bowles's writing deals almost exclusively with what people say and do. There's almost no interiority, no mention of what anyone thinks or feels, beyond someone occasionally saying something to themselves, like an aside to the audience during a play. It makes the women's already sort of mysterious actions seem even more opaque. I say sort of mysterious because what they're doing doesn't especially seem to make them happy, and we don't really learn any other motive or goal.
 
Another thing I read in this style was the short story "An Hour of Last Things" by George P Elliott, who is best known for having almost the same name as a much more famous author. In that, a woman's husband dies, she goes out to buy an expensive stereo system, and throws herself a big party, and like Mrs Copperfield, it's implied but not stated that the widow is attracted to a younger woman. Barbara Comyns' book Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is similarly almost Behaviorist in its refusal to depict interiority, but is a much stronger book overall, in my opinion. I'd happily swap it for Two Serious Ladies on any list recommending short, strange midcentury novels by overlooked women writers.
 
Just because it's not for me though, doesn't mean it's not for anyone, and women breaking with convention in pursuit of their own pleasure are certainly having a literary moment right now. There's even another new reprint of Two Serious Ladies, with a new intro and new cover art, out just last year. I'm certain the cult following will continue. If you're in the mood, I'd suggest sipping gin during Mrs Copperfield's chapter and whiskey for Miss Goering, perhaps starting off listening to Helen Kane sing "I Want to be Bad" to set the mood.

DIE 3

 
 
DIE 3

The Great Game

by Kiren Gillen

art by Stephanie Hans

Image Comics

2020 

 

 

In the first volume of DIE, six teenagers in England in 1990 found six magic dice, and disappeared into the fantasy world of Die, an Earth-sized planet shaped like an icosahedron, a d20. They were trapped their for years, living out fantasy adventures in their roles as the mind-controlling Dictator, the lucky Fool, the emotion-powered Grief Knight, the cyberpunk Neo, the God Binder, who trades favors with supernatural entities, and the Master, who runs the game. Eventually the group learned a magic ritual that would let them leave and return home, but when they left, Solomon, their friend who'd first found the dice and acted as the Master, was seized by the evil Grandmaster who ruled the whole world of Die.
 
25 years after they returned, the now middle-aged friends got pulled back into Die. In the intervening years, Solomon had killed the old Grandmaster and become the new one. He wanted the game to resume, and the others couldn't leave without changing his mind or killing him. He holed up inside his fortress in Glass Town, protected by the armies of Little England and besieged by the armies of Eternal Prussia. The group has long since decided that although strange, the planet Die is real, and its inhabitants have the same moral worth as people living on Earth. Despite this, they also agreed to help Eternal Prussia break the siege and crack the giant bell jar protecting Glass Town so they could kill Sol and go home. The plan succeeded, but then not everyone was ready to leave yet...
 
So then in volume 2, the group split, then recombined, and split again. Initially, two members wanted to stay for awhile to avoid their problems back on Earth, while the others wanted to return immediately. With time to settle in though, everyone starts to feel guilty about what they did to Glass Town and worried about what Eternal Prussia might be doing in there. When they split up again, it's basically a disagreement about tactics instead of goals.
 
Now in volume 3, Dictator Ash and God Binder Izzy are co-ruling the nation of Angria, which is based on the fantasy world the Bronte siblings created together as children. The WWI-era hobbit army of Little England arrives at Angria's capital to demand Ash's surrender for her role in the fall of Glass Town. She arranges to meet with the Master of Little England, who turns out to be HG Wells. He explains that the German inventor of the original military wargame, Kriegspiel was drawn to Die, and his game formed the basis of Eternal Prussia. Wells blamed Kriegspiel for emboldening Germany's military, and wrote his own Little Wars game to try to discourage actual warfare. Ash disillusions him by revealing that WWI happened anyway, and Wells sets off in his time machine to do ... something. But the meeting succeeds in forging an alliance between Little England and Angria.
 
The others are all headed for Glass Town directly. Along the way, they meet a Fallen version of Neo Angela's daughter. The Fallen are like zombie orcs. When Sol became one after they killed him, they realized all the Fallen are former players who died on Die. They wonder how any Fallen could've already been there in 1990, if they were really the first players to arrive. (HG Wells and Charlotte Bronte are Masters, not players.) They also wonder how Angela's daughter could be there, and why she's years older than when Angela left. 
 
They learn from some helpful dwarves that Sol actually created the 12 toy soldiers that inspired the Brontes to write their Angria stories. Eventually the meet some Fair (robot elves from the future) who reveal that Die itself is from the future, but that it draws in people from the past to help ensure its own existence. It sent the toy soldiers back to recruit the Brontes, and the magic dice back to recruit Ash, Angela, and the others. What Eternal Prussia is making in Glass Town now, almost 30 years after their first visit, are the dice that will bring them here. If the dice are made and sent, the Die will merge with Earth in 2020. So Angela's daughter, and the other Fallen, are like the ghosts of people who haven't died yet, but will. Or they could all be saved, if the group can interrupt the creation of the magic dice...
 
Because Gillen is giving us a close-up view of these characters, we really only see three faces of Die - Angria, Little England, and Eternal Prussia, plus the Grandmaster's Realm on face 20. I can't help but wonder what would be on the other sixteen sides! 
 
Planet Die is an interesting villain. Like Roko's Basilisk, it's a malign intelligence from the future that's manipulating the past in order to ensure its own creation. Normally I wouldn't think if a planet as being a villain, but several characters who would know have suggested that Die either has or is being controlled by some sort of evil mind. I'm not totally sure how the Fair fit into this; maybe they're from further in the future, after Die merges with Earth. Ordinarily, in comics, I'd expect the good guys to win, but this is a dark enough fantasy that a downer ending seems possible.