Dial H (The Complete Series)

 

When I first started this blog I wrote about the first four issues of Dial H. You can read the full thing here but I summed up by saying that Dial H had been one of the surprise hits of the New 52 relaunch and was one of the most inventive and enjoyable comic books available.

A brief refresher for those who've forgotten or were unaware to begin with. Dial H begins as a story about Nelson Jent, an overweight fella who discovers a magic phonebox near his flat (apartment, whatves) that can turn people into superheroes for a limited time. It began as a reboot of old title Dial H For Hero, designed only to play a minor and peripheral part in DC's New 52 event-slash-crossover-slash-reboot.

The old title featured protagonist Robby Reed getting into scrapes that could only be solved via use of the phonebox (it was a simpler, less demanding time for comic writers). China Mieville, author of the New 52 edition, took a different approach. Instead of a weekly adventure approach he wrote a long-running plot that involved alternate universes, reality-eating monstrosities, and, fittingly but surprisingly, the history of telephones. It was often difficult to read but in hindsight that was only because Mieville was writing each issue as a chunk of a whole. When the first six issues were done they told their own satisfying story that made sense, though there were obviously some threads left dangling. With Mieville being a novelist this was to be expected.

And that was just the first six issues. After that Mieville began focusing on what really interested him: the origins of the phonebox. He took the relatively simple idea of a phonebox that gives superpowers to ordinary people (something I suspect original creators Jim Mooney and Dave Wood lifted from Superman) and created an entire mythology around them. It's staggering how much detail Mieville manages to pack in about the history of the dials. He works in an otherworldly war, phone lines as another plane of existence, and multiple new dials, as well as addressing the question of where the dialled superheroes actually come from. It's an incredible achievement not only to have thought of everything he has bit to have written it in a way that seems fluid and natural. It could easily have been a case of continuous and boring infodumping. Mieville writes a story that’s fascinating and enjoyable, something that can be appreciated for its invention, its humour and story.

The artists who worked on the series warrant a mention too. Mateus Santolouco drew the first six issues (numbered zero to five) and did just as much as Mieville to establish the tone of the book with his grubby, dingy backstreets and bright, colourful and charismatic superheroes. Fill in artist David Lapham did a fine job and was replaced permanently by Alberto Ponticelli. He was more in line with the regular DC artist, someone who draws action sequences and dynamic poses, but he also understood the quirky nature of Dial H. In particular he triumphed with Open Window Man and The Centipede, strange characters who could easily have lost a lot of their impact with the wrong artist. Brian Boland provided a cover for each of the series’ issues. They were predictably excellent.

Sadly DC is apparently not a company willing to fund satisfying creativity. Dial H didn't get good enough sales and so was cancelled after seventeen issues. As DC is a company that makes more than enough money from its big titles, merchandise and films I think they could have allowed for a title that lost them money but was a creative success. In the long run it probably would have paid off for them as trade paperback and digital sales could have recouped cash in the long term.

Apparently it wasn’t worth keeping around even for that. They did at least have the good grace to grant Mieville time to wrap things up and allocated him an extra-long final issue. The reduced time resulted in a truncated conclusion (I suspect far longer would have been spent exploring the concept of various other dials had the book continued) but it did at least get to end. So many inventive series don't even get that.

Although it didn't go on for as long as Mieville would probably have liked Dial H is still something worth treasuring. It's a clever, imaginative read that's uncompromising in its pacing but knows where it’s going. It is one of Mieville’s greatest accomplishments.

Ultimate Avengers: Next Generation

Both series of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s Ultimates were well received by those who read them. They reworked the origins of Marvel’s premier superteam for a modern audience and told mature episodic stories. They are amongst the best comics written since the turn of the millennium. Not even the horrible misfire that was Jeph Loeb’s Ultimates 3 could ruin them.

In 2008 Marvel decided to shake up their Ultimate line with a big crossover apocalypse event dubbed Ultimatum. The line’s credibility had already taken a battering with the Ultimate Power story but Ultimatum was worse. It was designed as a reboot of the whole line. It achieved that goal, with all ongoing titles either being cancelled or rebranded with new numbering, but also delivered an incredibly boring story that insulted fans and made no sense to new readers.

One good thing did come out of the reboot though: Mark Millar returned to write more stories using some of the characters he’d used in The Ultimates. Confusingly this new book was dubbed Ultimate Comics: The Avengers. The Ultimates were an Ultimate universe version of the Avengers, whilst the Ultimate universe’s Avengers were a black-ops S.H.I.E.L.D. team. It’s a minor detail and what that doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things but, well, it’s always seemed like Marvel made a choice with the name.

Poor choice of title aside it was a promising start. Millar had proven skilled at spinning compelling modern day superhero yarns that fused politics, history and pseudo-science with traditional superheroic action. With access to all the characters he’d written so well and a promise that he would be using ideas he’d originally planned for further Ultimate series it looked like Marvel were on to a winner.

The first six issue series, subtitled Next Generation, saw Nick Fury rehired by S.H.I.E.L.D. (after some time spent in an alternate universe he’d been involved in trying to destroy) and tasked with bringing in a rogue Captain America. Aside from those two the only other established character in the series is Hawkeye. He still sports the strange redesign insisted on by Jeph Loeb (it makes him look more serious, allegedly) but is written well again. He’s no longer the strange suicide-obsessed killing machine he became in Ultimates 3.

The new characters are Codename: Nerd Hulk, a good natured guy with Hulk’s body and Bruce Banner’s mind; Fury’s ex-wife Monica Chang as a new Black Widow; Insect Queen from the villainous Liberators team the Ultimates battled in the Grand Theft America arc, here renamed Red Wasp; Colonel Rhodes, who has the most advanced Iron Man suit on the planet; and Gregory Stark, the tee total, amoral brother of Tony who regards his brother as a feeble-minded disappointment. Written here it just seems like a list of ideas, continuity references and inverted regulars. Millar writes them with humour and makes them as believable as any Marvel character needs to be.

Even though he’s on the run Cap is at the centre of the story. The opening issue shows him discovering that he has a son. And not just any son. A son who is just as physically, mentally and tactically gifted as him. It’s the Red Skull.

Ultimate Red Skull is not a superhuman created during the Third Reich. He’s an American born to Cap’s girlfriend Betty and taken to a US military base as a baby. His escape at the age of seventeen, during which he slaughtered hundreds of employees, is shown, establishing how formidable an opponent Skull is.

The success of the book lies in the way Millar melds his ideas with a compelling plot. His naturalistic dialogue doesn’t hurt either. By the end of issue six you know what everyone’s motivations are and what they hope to gain from their black-ops work. Well, mostly. Gregory Stark is left a distant and shifty enigma. And the Spider-man sitting inside a glass tank inside S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Triskelion HQ is a complete mystery.

Artist Carlos Pacheco is excellent. It’s disappointing he didn’t get to return to work on any of the other three volumes of Ultimate Avengers. His knack for drawing action sequences was a boon for the series. With Next Generation Ultimate Avengers gets off to a strong start and shows that Mark Millar is still the best thing to have happened to Marvel’s Ultimate line. Definitely recommended reading.

Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is a programme with a lot of potential. Okay, the big name superheroes and villains may be inaccessible because the rights have either been sold to film studios or because Marvel’s holding them in reserve for future projects, but the seventy-year-old fictional universe is a big place. There are dozens of minor characters that could be plucked from obscurity and made into a relevant and enjoyable part of a modern day TV series. How about Wonderman or Mr Immortal or Photon or Tigra?

There are plenty of oddball plots and series that are never going to be converted for the silver screen. Delving into Marvel’s Essential collections would turn up plenty of material. A look at Jim Steranko’s S.H.I.E.L.D. work would be a good idea too. In fact I think the creative types working on the show have a great deal more freedom than those working on Marvel film projects for Fox, Sony or Marvel themselves.

The problem the show has is that this potential has come nowhere close to being lived up to. The show is too serious, too po-faced, too concerned with being seen as gritty and relatable. Everything from the drab stories to the cynically written and-or boring cast of characters demonstrates this. It’s a Joss Whedon show so I understand we’re going to have snarky nerds and Kung Fu lovin’ women but that doesn’t mean that’s all we have to have.

Agent Coulson is possibly the worst offense. Beyond the central mystery of how he was resurrected after death and the clumsy (and frequent) references to his time in Tahiti (mysteries I have no interest in hearing the resolution to by the way) there’s nothing to the character. As a recurring minor character in films he was fine. As a central figure on a TV show he falls apart. His motivations are supposed to be a combination of enigmatic and mysterious, his lines droll, but he’s just tedious and uninteresting. In fairness he’s the one character that had to be included as he provides the link between the films and the show but that’s no reason to make him a chore to watch.

A sense of grittiness and overly-tense characters are things that concern too many drama shows. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. would make a greater impact if it embraced a sense of fun and tried to impress viewers with a sense of wonder. Grittiness can be seen any drama show. Fun and wonder cannot. S.H.I.E.L.D. is an organisation tasked with protecting the world from aliens, magic, tyrants, and errant superheroes. There’s a lot that could be done with the premise, but those in charge seem reticent to embrace that.

Episode four, Eye Spy, started in the right way. It depicted dozens of grey suit-wearing men marching in unison through public places clutching briefcases, their faces covered in red masks. The reason for it happening, when it was revealed, was boring, but the visual was both something different and compelling. If the show could dream up similarly intriguing images and marry them to plots that deserve them then it would be on the right track.

All These Channels and Nothing Worth Watching

To some people “adaption” is a dirty word. The idea of a story told in one medium being transferred to another is seen as a slight on the original. To an extent I can understand this view. Ironically it’s adaptions that slavishly adhere to their source material that tend to fare worse. This tends to be because the people working on the adaption are trying to recreate something using a different set of tools. They want to do the original justice but don’t have the means to do so. A good adaption will take the core concept and story points from their source and rework them in their new medium. Finding new ways to show what makes the original so enjoyable is the sort of approach I think suits adaptions best.

 

While I can understand this feeling it’s not one I tend to agree with. I think if something is adapted well then there’s a point to doing it. It can find new things to say or new ways of saying things the original already said. It can lead to a better understanding of the original. Most importantly no adaption takes anything away from its source material. If it fails the original is still around to be enjoyed.

 

The reason I mention all of this is that I thought it would be a nice change to write about something other than a good or bad comic book. There are loads of comics out there that I think would work well as television shows. Twenty-odd pages a month is rarely enough space for a writer and artist to fit in plot, character development, interesting ideas, and a bit of mystery (all those things that are so important to something being enjoyable). Television adaptions would create opportunities for exploration that comics deny, and would also make more people aware of some very good series.

 

I’ve picked out ten comics, as much because I like round numbers as for anything else, that I think would be interesting TV shows. They are listed below.

 

Fables

Read a review here.

I’m not keen on the comic book but the general idea of it, characters from fables, myths and nursery rhymes are all real, is incredibly strong. Certainly strong enough to support a TV series for a few series. The original plot is a meandering mess though. That would be best left behind. A show showing how Humpty Dumpty gets by living on a farm in North Carolina is what I want, not an attempt at a modern epic.

 

Sandman

Read a review here.

A straight adaption of Sandman could work but it would need a pretty beefy budget. A vaguer adaption would work better, taking the general concept and more interesting characters of the book and doing a show more about dreams and reality than the machinations of Morpheus. The Sandman is often only a bystander in the comic. There’s no reason he couldn’t be someone who appears in a minor role in every episode of a TV series, having his own plot (based on Gaiman’s original) revealed over time.

 

Powers

Superheroes have been popular with moviegoers for over a decade now. There have been successes, like Smallville, and failures, like Heroes from series two onwards, on TV screens during this time. Right now there are no superhero themed shows that mean much to anybody and Powers could change that. It blends superpeople thrills and spills with the police procedural genre and does it well. It works very nicely as a noir flavoured comic but a different tone would probably be needed for television. The basic idea of a police department that focuses on superpeople, and the main characters of Walker and Pilgrim, seem ideal.

 

American Vampire

A new strain of vampire (an American vampire, obvs) is created in nineteenth century America. The comic follows that strain, in the form of first-of-the-new-breed Skinner Sweet, through the following decades. It might sound a little True Blood but it needn’t be. The focus being on a new kind of vampire, rather than the love lives of vamps that must adhere to the rules we’ve all become familiar with from fiction, would set it apart, as would the historical setting.

 

Ignition City

Read a review here.

I noted when I wrote about this that it felt as though Warren Ellis had treated it like a TV show. At only five issues long there are loads of things about this world that aren’t explored in enough detail. The book is set on a steampunk island that used to be a rocket base, an interesting location for a TV show (it strikes me as very BBC Three). In just five issues Ellis created a cast of characters that you could easily imagine interacting for a dozen episodes before newbies were required. Plus there are aliens. It’s a very broad canvas for a TV adaption.

 

DMZ

This is a comic series set in New York City during a civil war between the United States of America and the secessionist Free States of America. The central figure is a reporter named Matty Roth, who’d make an ideal lead character in an adaption with an ensemble cast. Or an entirely new cast could be created, because what makes Roth ideal as a lead character is that he is suitably bland and uninteresting. It’s the general idea of America going through a civil war that would make this an interesting adaption, not any particular character. An ideal adaption would just use the broad premise and focus on the mayor’s office, the police, the army, and the secessionists struggling for control of the city, with only hints as to the wider picture.

 

Y: The Last Man

Read a review here.

Two things would make Y worth turning into a TV show. The first is the relationships between the characters. Brian K Vaughan did a good job of writing friendships that grew over time and natural dialogue. The other would be the central mystery of how Yorick survived the plague that should have killed every male on the planet. A TV adaption would be the ideal opportunity to create a new ending that does the series as a whole justice. The one we have is too confusing and at odds with what’s gone before to be completely satisfying.

 

Also in Y’s favour is that it’s a story that has affected the whole world. It can be as big or as small as people writing it want it to be. A big budget could see parts filmed in Israel and Europe (like the book) while a smaller adaption could simply focus on the trek across America. The entire plot of the original could be scrapped and the idea could be reworked to focus on a small town harbouring the last surviving man.

 

Preacher

Read a review here. 

Preacher is a very rounded comic book, making it one of the better suggestions on this list. It’s known for being humorous, violent and having a cast full of grotesques. What it’s less noted for is being a love story, which it is, and for being pretty heavy on action in places, which it is. Jesse Custer is a genuinely likeable protagonist (or at least he is when written, careful casting would be needed to retain that), something that I find pretty rare in TV shows. Cassidy, Assface, the Saint of Killers and Herr Starr are a supporting cast who feel like they were created to be seen on TV.

 

The central plot is something that would probably need to stay. Without it Preacher doesn’t work. But the journey that’s taken and the interactions between the central characters could be altered to make something new and interesting. Preacher is one of the best comics out there for TV adapters.

 

There’s been talk of putting Preacher on TV for years. The latest news on that is that it’s happening and Seth Rogen is involved. Personally I’d cast WWE star The Undertaker as the Saint of Killers. But that’s me.

 

100 Bullets

Read a review here.

Crime dramas and ongoing mysteries have become big parts of TV schedules over the last several years. So have mobsters. 100 Bullets has all of this (obviously, I wouldn’t mention it otherwise). None of the shows mentioned here could run indefinitely but 100 Bullets would come the closest. The basic idea of a shadowy cabal having secretly controlled the United States for centuries is easy enough to understand but complex enough to spend time gradually revealing. And of course the Minutemen are the sort of thing modern television viewers seem to love.

 

There are so many stories from the series that would be great on screen and there are lots of original things that could be done with the idea of people being made the offer of the untraceable gun. In fact all new offers and how they play out would make nice to or three minute pre-title sequences.

 

Locke & Key

Read a review of the first volume here.

A feature length pilot was made years ago but nothing came of it. Apparently Fox didn’t think it would work as a series. They’re wrong. Locke & Key is perfect for a TV show, so much so that I’m amazed a series doesn’t already exist. There’s a worthwhile plot that runs across the book’s six volumes that would be ideal as a programme’s central focus, with each volume having its own arc that could be used for either an entire series or multiple episodes. There’s a great template waiting to be used.

 

But what would really make a TV version of Locke & Key worth it would be the ability to do something new with such a great concept. It was always very clear in the comic that there were other keys that hadn’t been used or even seen. Filler episodes or new arcs could be created to make the most of that fact. There’s so much that could be done with the idea of the keys.