Justice League #23.3: Dial E – Review

By: Too many to list—check out the review.

The Story: I’m holding out for a villain—wait…

The Review: I was both surprised and heartened by the inclusion of the Dial H property to the Villains Month campaign.  It wasn’t just that the series was short-lived; it was also largely disconnected from the DCU despite being ostensibly placed in it.  There just hasn’t been time or opportunity for any part of the series’ mythos to stick with the general DC readership.  Yet here it is, alongside icons like Lex Luthor and Joker and other major icons.

Surely that speaks to the respect deservingly accorded to China Miéville’s work on Dial H while it lasted.  In many ways, this one-shot feels like an admiring tribute to Miéville’s boldness and seemingly endless inventiveness as a writer, with page after page of brand-new characters and superpowers, each more outrageous than the last.  Some require no more than their punny name to sum up their entire being (e.g. SufferKate and Goad), while others take a little more effort to fully appreciate.  Decalcomaniac, for example, looks ridiculously useless at first glance, up until the point he begins smearing the “paint” of his victims, rendering them painfully disfigured.

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.