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.

Dial H #5 – Review

By: China Miéville (story), Mateus Santolouco (art), Tanya & Richard Horie (colors)

The Story: Cheating an old woman out of heads or tails?  That’s the hero you get without a dial.

The Review: It really is unfortunate that Zero Month interfered with the timing of this arc, as Miéville had just started developing momentum on what had up to #4 been a pretty obtuse story.  Not that #0 was bad or had no value—au contraire.  We learned a fairly valuable point about the nature of the Dial and how its powers work, and undoubtedly that will tie into Miéville’s bigger plans for the series.  Still, it interrupted an arc at its climax, and that is never a good thing.

Anyway, I guess it’s more graceful for me to say that I’m happy we’ve come back to the story at hand.  Even though I still haven’t read a lick of Miéville’s literary output to this day (much to Alex’s chagrin, I’m sure), I’ve always recognized his talent.  Up until #4, though, I thought his ambitions had run a bit far afield of what a mainstream comic could really achieve.  Yet against all odds, he’s managed to deliver a fully-formed mystery that you can actually follow.

Dial H #4 – Review

By: China Miéville (story), Mateus Santolouco (art), Tanya & Richard Horie (colors)

The Story: Apparently, it doesn’t take a hero or a dial to dial a hero.

The Review: Last month, I expressed some concern that for all the ambitious, high-concept, clearly ubiquitous material Miéville has been writing, it might come to lead to a whole lot of big ideas with little payoff.  Miéville fans quickly assured me that things will eventually fall into place, that this author knows what he’s doing, even when the story seems haphazard and somewhat obscure.

And indeed, things have fallen into place, so I’m mightily chagrined at having doubted that they never would.  All the loose, disparate elements of the arc finally reveal some clear connections to each other in a way I didn’t think possible.  Of course, it takes quite a bit of creative, out-of-this-world explanation to link a ghetto-talking reptile alien, a doctor/occultist, and a fat dude with a magic telephone dial together, but Miéville manages to do it, which is worth praise in itself.

Dial H #3 – Review

By: China Miéville (story), Mateus Santolouco (art), Tanya & Richard Horie (colors)

The Story: More proof that the telephone is a conspiracy to bring down civilization.

The Review: No matter where you go or what you do, you’ll always run into elitists.  These folks can’t help separating the high-brow from the low-brow, and making you feel like a Philistine if you don’t make those same distinctions.  In the world of comics, these people tend to refer to anything involving superheroes as “mainstream” (said in a condescending tone).  They’ll see the entertainment value, but it won’t live up to their lofty ideals of what comics should be.

And you know, they’re not entirely wrong.  No one can deny that the primary appeal of the superhero genre is all about escapism.  We gravitate towards particular titles sometimes because of the depth of their stories, but mostly because we resonate with those characters and want to embody them in some way.  Dial H taps into that escapist quality, allowing its protagonist to fulfill our secret dreams to be better than ourselves.