Dial H #5

"Disconnected"
written by China Miéville
art by Mateus Santolouco

"A few days ago I was just some guy.  I'm still just some guy.  Some guy working with his best friend's murderer to rescue an old lady superhero.  To fight a supervillain and an angry void."  (Dial H #5: 1)

"Disconnected" resumes the hunt for Abyss, a ravenous nothingness consuming all light, threatening to turn the world into a cold, dark, lifeless rock or perhaps to eat it into nothing.  Dr. Wald, a.k.a. Ex Nihilo and now superhero Hairbringer, was so hubristic that the assumed the creature would show some allegiance to her for bringing it back into the world, but the nullomancer soon discovers otherwise.  Forced into strangely amicable cooperation with Darren's murderer the Squid and now finding himself in equally strange collusion with a villainous mastermind, Nelson and Wald collaborate to turn the Abyss's small offspring voids against their parent/maker.

It is, perhaps, a convenient solution, but one with wonderfully unexpected execution and consequences.  Santolouco's Abyss has always been a gorgeously massive and star-filled monster, who glitters with the light it's already devoured.  In magic-logic and poetically symmetrical physics, nothing eating something begets nothing, but nothing eating nothing begets something.  As the befuddled little voidlets eat away at their progenitor, he turns into an awesome and grotesquely crumbling stone statue in the middle of Littleville.  In the words of the Squid, "They'll chew it into dense dead presence" (14).  The Squid, ironically in context, is also gives voice to Miéville's eloquent, beautiful, and a little painful tribute to human language and expression:

"Some people on my world...  ...think the whole of our universe is just the effluent of nihils' predation on each other...   ...that we live in the crumbling corpolite of nul-eat-nul.  That matter is the leftover of void rapacity, like that ugly statue, that abyssal aftermath.  It sounds better in your languages.  I learned 17 when I came.  I could never decide which was my favorite.  Or which voice to use."  (18)

While it grants a greater depth to the Squid, turns a character introduced as little more than a mindless goon in X.N.'s employ into a quietly philosophical and aesthetically minded solon, it's largely ancillary to the main story.  Instead, it's an example of precisely the deep appreciation of human creativity and experience that makes Miéville's thoughtful world so elegant and poignant.

Even as the Abyss and Wald are defeated, another shadowy figure with full command of its Dial emerges out of the Abyss in search of H-Dials, disarming and killing Wald in the process.  Nelson's still-glitchy Dial, which switched off just before the creature emerged onto scene may have saved him and Roxie (Manteau, now unmasked) from a similar fate for the moment, but it already poses a significant threat to any Dial user and stands poised as the next arc's likely antagonist.

Superheroes:  Rescue Jack (un-dialed), [unnamed Swiss Army knife hero], Hairbringer, Atavist, Timekiller, Girl Eclipse, Cock-a-Hoop

[December 2012]