Dial H #6 – Review

By: China Miéville (story), David Lapham (art), Tanya & Richard Horie (colors)

The Story: Sometimes the only thing left to do on a slow news day is to take a dump.

The Review: There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of superhero as a genre, one of which is how often it tends to fixate on the perfectly proportioned and the beautiful as heroes.  If the average Plain Jane makes an appearance, it’s usually through a supporting character, while full-on uggos get relegated to villains (even Deadpool and Jonah Hex were studs once).  You don’t need to look much further than that to support a theory of superficiality in comics.

Though I don’t see a break in that trend anytime soon, this title goes comfortingly against the grain by at once starring an out-of-shape loser of a man and an elderly spinster.  The dynamic between the two, as you can imagine, is like nothing you’ve seen in comics before, at least, not in recent memory and certainly not in any mainstream book.  Strange as the pairing may seem, Miéville establishes Nelson and Roxie as viable leads and heroes, doing right by us commoners.