Dial H #15

"Crossed Wires"
written by China Miéville
pencils by Alberto Ponticelli
inks by Dan Green

There are two phases to Miéville's over-sized conclusion to his spectacular run of Dial H:  the explanation and the action climax.  While both are satisfying finishes, the explanation—offered in the stilted but poetic prose of the Fixer—is the better of the two.  Miéville's mythology for the Dials is subtle and deep:  a hodgepodge of shadowy characters, mysterious villains, ever-multiplying dials, a distant but cruelly remembered Dial War, and scattered, faulty Dials littering multiple worlds.  And while we may lament that we get no more of it than we do, it's refreshing here that he presents the outlines clearly here.  Miéville's action-packed finale is rewarding but less engaging than his ideas and dialogue.

The real treat of "Crossed Wires" is the unveiling of the Operator, the mysterious "O," who crash-landed on Earth after retroactively bombing the Exchange in the midst of the Dial War siege.  He and his acolyte the Centipede, for whom he has crafted an E-Dial for "evil" (which is poised to feature in Miéville's Justice League #23.3), have been dialing apocalypses on their Doom-Dial to take revenge on those worlds that fought against the exchange in the Dial War.  One of Miéville's finest contrivances was to reverse the image of the phone, which is no longer the inspiration for the Dials but the reflection of them.  The Exchange existed first, and only in the Operator's efforts to reproduce those dials do man's inventions for the telephone derive.

Even in its final episode, Miéville continues to pepper Dial H liberally with esoteric details culled from a wide gamut of fields.  Proper dials are "ectypes".  The previous issue's Metacastle is destroyed by the Operator's Doom-Dial by calling up the favored apocalypse of Urschleimopolis.  The assault on the Exchange and its Operators for the preservation of the worlds' "unique essences," later referred to only as the Dial War, was mounted by the coalition forces of the Material Protection Alterity Army and the Rapid Interreality Assault Alliance, MPAA and RIAA, representatives of motion pictures and recording studios respectively.

All in all, Miéville has crafted a series-long meditation on superheroes, villains, the inevitable consequences of power and the potential for its exchange, and the virtue of uniqueness.  Dial H is a series that not only recalls moments from earlier issues—Bumper Carla, for instance, makes another silent appearance here—but one that effectively foreshadows the story's direction, and it does it so deftly that I'm confident I didn't catch a lot of it.  It's for that reason that I anticipate eagerly returning to re-read the full run in the short future.  It's a difficult read to be sure, complicated and Daedalean, but peerlessly rewarding.

Superheroes:  Secret Faction, Watertower, Blink Centurion, Ponder, Monodon Seer (i.e., Narwhal), Crosshairs, Matryoshka, Galaxy, Captain Baker, Girl Coelacanth, Pie Chart, Kid Red, DeFacer, Still Small Voice, Matterhorn, Jab Cross, Muriatic Man, The Coagulator, LobotoMist, Chimney Lachrymose, Pelican Bluff, Tugboat Resin, Synapsetrix, Ctrl-Alt-Daffodil, Rancid Hoop, Cloud Skeet, Flame Snail

Sidekicks:  Exhaust

[October 2013]