I don't read many graphic novels, but, hey, China Mieville. Nelson Jent is down on his luck, unemployed, overweight, and just had a heart attack before his 30th birthday. He accidentally discovers that dialing H-E-R-O in a certain disused public phone booth (remember phone booths?) will turn him into a superhero. But the transformation is only temporary, the dial won't always work - and Nelson becomes a different superhero each time. Captain Lachrymose, for example, paralyzes criminals with grief by bringing their saddest memories back irresistably. Mieville's fabulous imagination supplies numerous weird, funny, and sometimes disgusting, superpowers. Nelson must confront criminals, a rival dial-driven superhero, and entities from other dimensions as he seeks to understand what's going on.

Th artist team here provides suitably vivid renderings of Mieville's ideas. Lots of pages with story panels interspersed on top of a full-page image, so that the reader must figure out the reading sequence. Dramatic and active, but sometimes a bit of a chore to read.

Note that DC Comics cancelled this series, unfinished, after one more volume. ( )

China Mieville is one of my favorite authors. I've read almost all his books, and even though I didn't love all of them, a couple of them are probably in my top 10 books ever. So I was pretty excited to find out he was writing comics.

This had some of his trademark strangeness and some of his incomprehensible-ness to go along with it via alien intelligences speaking almost gibberish. Some of the hero ideas were absolutely ridiculous and really strange, but they were a ton of fun and we get some of the background behind "Dial H" (which I had never read before).

Looking forward to Vol 2. ( )

Continuing with the theme of not-comic-writers writing comics after the Coates/Stelfreeze Black Panther, I picked up the first collection of China Miéville's take on Dial H for Hero. It's a great take on the idea, with a total schlub being the guy that finds the magic(?) phone dial that turns you into a bizarre superhero (e.g. Captain Lachrymose, who forces his enemies to remember their saddest memories) each time you use it. I'm not as wild about Miéville's choice to pit him against two villains trying to summon a being from the depths of nothingness or....something. The entire arc in general feels like something that probably made perfect sense in the script but doesn't translate well to the final page. The last story, looking back in time at a past user of the dial, just makes the entire thing feel like even more of a missed opportunity, as it starts to open up some great questions - what do you do when you have superpowers based on a racist caricature? Do you retain the memories of being this other person? What happens when you end up as someone of a different gender? Unfortunately, none of these ever get looked at in any depth, when each of those could be a whole issue unto itself. There's a lot of promise here (and sadly, this only ran to one more collection), but it's kind of buried under a lot of mucking around.

( )

Strange superheros are pretty standard in GNs these days but when China Miéville sets out to come up with weird, silly, upsetting or surreal superheros he can do it. Not a pretty book and only fun in a how weird can it get way, this is too chaotic over the edge for me. ( )

Reminiscent of the late 1980s second British invasion titles from the likes of Grant Morrison (Doom Patrol, Animal Man), Jamie Delano (Hellblazer), and Peter Milligan (Shade, The Changing Man), the Hugo and Nebula winner China Miéville makes his comics writing debut with the surprisingly apolitical Dial H Vol. 1: Into You. Nelson Jent, unemployed and out of shape, discovers that dialing H-E-R-O at a mysterious phone booth will transform him into a unique, short lived, superhero. Each new spin creates a new persona with a new set of powers. Miéville playfully manipulates the originally Silver Age comics concept by interjecting some truly bizarre and different heroes: Boy Chimney, who literally spews black smoke out of his stovepipe head; Captain Lachrymose, who derives strengths from others tears; CONTROL-ALT-DELETE; and countless others. Jent discovers someone who also uses a H-Dial and helps him master the strange powers. After a slow start, Miéville and artist Santolouco find their creative rhythm as they slowly uncover the history of the mysterious dials. Sadly, the lack of much needed political commentary, especially from the avowed Socialist Miéville, diminish the impact of the otherwise excellent comic. ( )