Dial H #15 – Review

By: China Miéville (story), Alberto Ponticelli (pencils), Dan Green (inks), Richard & Tanya Horie (colors)

I’m feeling the pinch of every penny these days, so when the cashier at my comic book shop scanned this issue, I immediately noticed the extra two bucks that rang up.  Fortunately, I did not make a scene in the middle of the shop (much to the cashier’s relief, I’m sure) as I quickly saw that I was paying the extra money for the extra pages of a supersized finale issue.  Miéville’s Dial H is certainly as worthy of the honor as Geoff Johns’ Green Lantern.

An honor, but also a necessity.  Even though this is Miéville’s last hurrah, he can’t just have fun with it; there’s a lot of information he has to get through first.  Had the series lasted longer, he no doubt would have unloaded all the necessary exposition little by little, so that by the time we arrived at the big climax, the only work left would be to tie everything up with one final revelation and a heartfelt resolution.  We do get all those things here as well, but they feel truncated and abridged, obviously edited to fit altogether in the span of one issue.

Dial H #12 – Review

By: China Miéville (story), Alberto Ponticelli (pencils), Dan Green (inks), Richard & Tanya Horie, Allen Passalaqua (colors)

The Story: Don’t be fooled by the curtain he’s wearing for a cape—this guy means business.

The Review: Although the potential of this series has been there from the start, only in the last few issues has it really developed into something special.  Miéville has slowly tightened up his freewheeling writing style; Roxie and Nelson have grown quite admirably into their roles as dual protagonists; and the story of the dial itself has become more focused and comprehensible, revealing what untapped riches continue to reside within the concept.

For a while, this series ran almost entirely on the power of the dial’s mystery, but now that we’ve got a clearer picture of where it comes from and how it works, all that’s left is to put it to some interesting uses.  Roxie and Nelson had their fun playing hero, but Earth’s pretty well taken care of already by an ever-growing crowd of folks with dependably consistent power sets.  The strength of the dial is its endless variety, and it needs more creative challenges than the bread-and-butter criminals and villains of this planet can provide.

Dial H #11 – Review

By: China Miéville (story), Alberto Ponticelli (pencils), Dan Green (inks), Richard & Tanya Horie (colors)

The Story: Not even the fastest man alive can escape a woman’s “We need to talk.”

The Review: Although quite a few other momentous events occurred last issue, the one that probably lingered on our minds after reading was Roxie and Nelson, in their dialed personas, engaging in some tonsil wrestling.  When this kind of thing happens in fiction, it usually goes one of two ways: the couple breaks out of their lip-lock and then part ways, stammering awkward excuses as they do, or they wind up doing the nasty and fight over it afterwards.

And it looks like for Roxie and Nelson, they will have to go through the post-coital conflict, because contrary to Nelson’s insistent denials, Roxie assures us, “We did.”  It’s a pretty funny scene with no hard jokes, the humor coming from Nelson’s increasing agitation in perfect contrast to Roxie’s businesslike demeanor.  It’s easy to see where their differing reactions come from.  Roxie, a child of the free-loving sixties, finds their liaison unusual, but otherwise natural; Nelson can’t get over the fact that he did it with a “wrinkled old…”

“Go on,” Roxie says with ominous calm.

Dial H #10 – Review

By: China Miéville (story), Alberto Ponticelli (pencils), Dan Green (inks), Richard & Tanya Horie (colors)

The Story: If you’re in trouble and you’ve already dialed a hero, who’s next on contact list?

The Review: In the last few months, I’ve given DC a hard time about the way it carries on some of its titles, and it’s only fair that I give praise where it’s due as well.  So kudos for allowing a totally oddball, quirky series like Dial H to go on for nearly a year (and still no cancellation announcement!) when so many others have gotten axed.  Although it may not seem so, this title may be one of the most important works DC is producing right now.

Now, that’s a pretty grand sort of statement which needs some clarification.  Dial H represents a fairly major evolutionary step in what a mainstream comic can be.  It’s a title about superheroes, and yet at the same time, it’s not.  It challenges your typical superhero conventions and in doing so, it makes you re-examine the nature of superheroes as both fictional archetypes and a genre.  To have all this going on in a comic that sits side-by-side with Batman is quite a big deal.

Dial H #9 – Review

By: China Miéville (story), Alberto Ponticelli (pencils), Dan Green (inks), Tanya & Richard Horie (colors)

The Story: America may have Superman, but Canada has…er…never mind.

The Review: With all these cancellations in the DC line going on, it’s made me naturally nervous for all the oddball titles out there, the ones that aren’t exactly top fifty, but which provide DC with some real diversity.  And it doesn’t get any odder or more diverse than Dial H, which continues to feel as fresh and ambitious as when it first launched.  While its fate is by no means secure, at least the publishing powers saw fit to keep it alive for a while longer.

Good thing for any of us who hope that Dial H signals an open door to more unconventional titles in the mainstream press later down the line.  Good thing, too, for Miéville, who clearly has a long-term plan in place for the series.  We’re nearly a year into the title’s life, and the focal point of the story, the Dial itself, still remains an enigma.  This issue doesn’t even offer a hint of new information as to the device’s origins, but it does indicate we’ll find out more soon.

Dial H #8 – Review

By: China Miéville (story), Alberto Ponticelli (pencils), Dan Green (inks), Tanya & Richard Horie (colors)

The Story: If you want to survive this, whatever you do, don’t call them “Hosers.”

The Review: Tom Bondurant of Grumpy Old Fan made an interesting observation about DC’s current line of comics, but on Dial H in particular.  Lamenting the lack of any real deviation from the superhero genre in the new 52, he admits that Miéville’s pet title is different, but still involves superheroes.  This is true, but also misses the point to some extent.  Miéville has used superheroes as a device to tell his story, but they aren’t necessarily the focal point of the series.

After all, Nelson and Roxie don’t really spend their time fighting villains and saving lives—not anymore, anyway, or at least not that we can see.  The heart of the title lies elsewhere, in the mysteries of the H-Dial and what it means for humankind.  Because Dial H goes through a an ever-shifting menagerie of superhero personalities, our attention latches on to the only constants in the story: Nelson and Roxie, whom you’d hesitate before describing as superheroes—right?

Dial H #7 – Review

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

The Story: Nothing like stepping off a plane, seeing the sights, and confronting a secret religion.

The Review: It’s still way too early to make a prediction about Dial H’s legacy, but I think one day, comics connoisseurs will flip through the holographic bins in their 3D shop and amidst all the virtual back-issues, through the slog of nearly all of DC’s relaunched titles (and by then, DC will be in the early throes of its fifth relaunch and known simply as Batman Comics), Dial H will pop out as one of the more courageous, distinctive, and ambitious titles of the time.

Simply put, Miéville does things in this series that even the other ostensibly avant-garde titles (Swamp Thing and Animal Man and its ilk) in the DC stable haven’t tried.  Nowhere is that more apparent than in the choice of leads.  In what other comic can an elderly lady and a middle-aged man, out of shape and unemployed, ever be the heroes again?  How many writers can even make that dynamic work?

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.