Wish Fulfillment: Dial H #1 Review

I always feels a certain level of excitement when I pick up a new comic by an established prose writer who’s never tackled the medium before. The kind of feeling that I imagine people get when they play Russian Roulette. You know that you’re holding something that is at least potentially very powerful; you know it has to at least be competently written, because book publishers rarely chuck money at any dingbat with a copy of MS Word… unless they’re using it to run a find / replace on some Twilight slashfic.

However, just because someone can write a book doesn’t mean they can write a comic book. Sometimes you get Neil Gaiman and Sandman (Yes, Gaiman wrote a book before he broke into comics). Unfortunately, other times you get more Brad Meltzer on Justice League of America; Brad spent so many issues showng Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman looking at pictures of potential League members that I began to suspect they were masturbating under the table while they were doing it.

All of which is a long way to go to say that China Miéville’s first issue of the rebooted Dial H is a well-plotted comic with a thoroughly weird, yet engaging, twist on the book’s original concept of a telephone that turns whoever uses it into a superhero. And it is well-written, in the sense that the pure language is entertaining and just damn fun to read. It’s not perfect, but for a dude who’s never written a comic book before, it’s a decent start.

Our hero is Nelson, who is a prime example of a cookie-cutter superhero-in-waiting, provided you like your cookies to look like morbidly obese drunkards who have just rocked their first heart attack in their twenties. It’s a reasonably cool concept to make someone like that a superhero, although the scene with the dude smoking two cigarettes at once is a little less developing character than it is mercilessly hammering the point home.

But our protagonist is one of the tricky bits that can come up when you get a prose writer coming into comics, particuarly when he takes on a book that is as pure a zero-effort-required wish fulfullment power fantasy – dial a phone, become a superhero – as has been written in comics since Green Lantern. And the tricky bit about it is I found myself saying, “Hmm; a fat unemployable fuck who can’t even make it up stairs becomes a superhero… is Miéville fucking pandering to what he pictures comics fans to be? Is he using the opportunity to write a comic book as some weird form of slumming? Is he mocking me?”

However, most of those concerns went away when Nelson becomes a superhero, because with the quality of the pure writing surrounding the superhero characters, there is no way in hell Miéville is endeavoring to talk down to us. First off, there’s the superhero personae themselves: we’ve got Captain Lachrymose, who dresses like a My Chemical Romance fan attacked a Superman suit with purple dye and a seamripper, and whose power is to concentrate any feelings of despair you have ever felt. Which might sound a little lame until Miéville shows Captain Lachrymose unmanning a gunman by reminding him of an unreceived birthday gift wish from when the gunman was seven. Which I scoffed at until I remembered how deeply hurt I was when I didn’t receive a Raydeen Shogun Warrior for my eighth birthday. Okay, it was my 38th birthday, but you’re reading a Web site about comic books, so don’t you fucking judge me.

And then there’s Boy Chimney, who looks like a Tim Burton fetish drawing of Johnny Depp from Burton’s most secret, page-stuck sketchbook. Boy Chimney has some kind of power of smoke, but ultimately it doesn’t matter, because the character exists to look like a steampunk horror wank pic, but he says… things…

Petrolbreath carbon particles ruin rendered effort bonedust burnt paper stinking singeing feathers char and oh poison…

So hush. Breathe.

I don’t give a shit who Boy Chimney is or what his powerset is, that is just flat out fun shit to read right there. It is Goddamned rare to get a comic book where just the language used is melodious and plain old interesting and thought-proviking to read. And Dial H, partiularly embodied in Boy Chimney’s external and internal dialogue, is loaded with just stellar use of language. And that is a rarity in comic books, and a pure joy to read.

I’m on the fence about Mateus Santolouco’s art. His general style is fine-lined and not particularly realistic; the people usually look like real people (No sculpted superhero over-idealized body types here), although his extremities are often overly tapered to the small side and appear out of proportion. He does admirably with the grotesque – Boy Chimney is of an inspired design, and since he is not meant to be realistic-looking, he works very well – and there is plenty grotesque here to play to Santolouco’s strengths. But otherwise, the art just feels a little… off to me. However, his storytelling is pretty clear (Things get a little dicey during the Boy Chimney sequence where Santolouco messes with panel layout to hammer home the strangeness of the situation, but it’s still followable) and the pacing seems fine, so how you feel about the art will be purely based on whether you buy into the style.

All in all, this is a damn promising opening to a series that… could go either way. While the characters are a little broad and characaturish, and it is far too early to tell where this story might go, what we have are some really unique superhero designs and some of the best pure writing you’re gonna find in any mainstream comic book. Try to put aside that the main character looks disturbingly like what your mom warned you your comic book habit would turn you into and see how it goes.