I was pleasantly surprised by just how much I loved the first issue of Earth Two, but Dial H was the comic I was most looking forward to. I’ve been a fan of most incarnations of the Dial H story, and even enjoyed most of Strazinsky’s use of it in Brave & The Bold. As a fan, I was really let down by this issue.

The premise is ok. To out of shape friends are at a low point in their lives, one of them is jumped, and the other needs to find a way to rescue him, and stumbles upon…a rotary phonebooth in an alley?

The problem with this comic is that it doesn’t know when it wants to be. If it wanted to use a rotary phonebooth, it either needed to take place in the mid to late twentieth century, or else Mieville needed to make the rotary phonebooth seem special, the way the TARDIS feels special in Doctor Who. Yes, it’s out of place, but it always seems to fit into the landscape. Mieville takes neither approach.

I also had a hard time believing in his characters. Despite a promising first couple of pages, I never got to the point where I cared about either of them. I do think he came up with some cool heroes for the protagonist to become. The first (who is also on the cover) was nicely creepy, and the second is hilarious. But those were the only pluses in the writing for me.

The art is fantastic. Santolouco’s Darren looks like an adult Pinnochio from Willingham’s Fables. And he makes both characters look realistically fat, which is tough to pull off without making them look like Mojo. (Actually, there is one panel of Nelse smoking two cigarettes where he looks eerily like Mojo, but it works.) He also does wonders with facial grammar.

Despite being less than impressed with this issue, I’m probably picking up number two in hopes that it gets better. I imagine, at the very least, it’ll be fun to watch Santolouco draw a bunch more superheroes.