Justice League #23.3: Dial E – Review

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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.

All this is good fun, as always, though it lacks the plotting Dial H always had beneath its revolving door of super-identities.  Having four street kids punk a dial and use it to flee both the authorities and the folks they burgled would make a better story with a little more context, but we barely know any more than the kids’ names.  Before you even get a good sense of their individual personalities, they’ve already started dialing and we all know what that does to a person’s identity.

And yet Miéville very determinedly ties the whole deal to some leftover plot threads from Dial H’s finale, at the cost of alienating new readers.  Can you imagine the reaction someone completely new to the series would have upon seeing a man in a blue suit and mascot-sized centipede head suddenly appear out of nowhere claiming a dial as his own?  For a fan, though, even a brief glimpse of the Centipede is a delight, though honestly, bullying a bunch of pre-pubescents is hardly the glorious return you might hope for.

But even for fans there’s confusion to be had here, in the form of mixed signals about the future of Dial H.  While the series finale didn’t provide quite the resolution you might have hoped for, it did feel conclusive.  Your sense was that Miéville had regretfully but gently closed the door on the multiverse he had created, yet the appearance of “Rescue Jill,” a completely new character altogether who shuts down Centipede on the edge of victory,* seems to crack that door back open.  Could this be a sign that we haven’t heard the last of dials in the DCU?  One can hope, but otherwise this is one strange tease Miéville’s giving us.

The tributary nature of the issue is further emphasized by the plethora of artists signed up to work on it, so many that it would be excessive to even list them in this review, rather yet evaluate them one-by-one.  And these aren’t small fry who’ve given their time to this supposedly inconsequential series: Jeff Lemire, Emma Rios, Jock, Frazier Irving, Alberto Ponticelli—all artists who have experience bringing a sophisticated edge to superhero comics.  Amazingly enough, despite a different artist on each page, there’s still a kind of overall consistency to the work as a whole, most likely thanks to the distinctive design of our four protagonists.

Conclusion: Hard to tell whether this issue represents Dial H’s last hurrah or a signal of its inevitable resurrection, but either way, it’s a strong sample of what made the series bizarre, but great.

Grade: B

- Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: * Centipede is surely one of the unluckiest villains of recent years.  I don’t think he’s ever had a moment of victory fully land before getting the rug pulled out from under him in some of the most humiliating ways possible.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.