China Miville Resurrects Dial H Comic For DCs New 52

Plus Grant Morrison finishes his six-year run of Dark Knight stories with Batman Incorporated , and more

Welcome to a new phase in China Miéville’s career, as sci-fi’s premier agitprop author makes the move into comics.

His resurrection of Dial H For Hero (which had previous runs in the ’60s and ’80s and 2003) forms one of the highlight of the second wave of DC’s The New 52. It will be called simply Dial H , with art by Mateus Santoluoco and covers (as above) by the legendary Brian Bolland.

The original comic series was about a dial-a-superpower service. DC describes Miéville’s version as “a bold new take on a cult classic concept about the psychological effects on an everyman who accidentally gains powers to become a hero.”

Miéville was briefly linked to a scripting run on Swamp Thing a while back, but that failed materialise. You could always ask him about Swamp Thing and Dial H at The SFX Weekender in February. Unless you haven’t got a ticket yet, because they’re all sold out.

“It's part of the sign of the New 52 growing up that it can afford to stretch its wings a little bit and so some things are a bit more left field,” says Miéville. “There’s room for a lot of different inflections in this vocabulary.”

The other highlight is Grant Morrison finishing his six-year run of Dark Knight stories with Batman Incorporated , which pits the Caped Crusader and his army of global crimefighters against former flame Talia al Ghul, with their son Damian (who also is the current Batman sidekick, Robin) caught in the middle. Art is by Chris Burnham.

“It’s like Kramer vs Kramer, but they’ve got thermonuclear capability,” says Morrison.

The other Second Wave titles are:

EARTH 2 – Writer: James Robinson. Artist: Nicola Scott. The greatest heroes on a parallel Earth, the Justice Society, combats threats that will set them on a collision course with other worlds.

WORLDS’ FINEST – Writer: Paul Levitz. Artists: George Perez and Kevin Maguire. Stranded on our world from a parallel reality, Huntress and Power Girl struggle to find their way back to Earth 2. Perez and Maguire will be the artists on alternating story arcs.

GI COMBAT – Writer: JT Krul. Artist: Ariel Olivetti. Featuring the return of a classic DC Comics series, The War That Time Forgot , along with rotating back-up stories and creative teams – including The Unknown Soldier , with writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti and artist Dan Panosian; and The Haunted Tank , with writer John Arcudi and artist Scott Kolins.

THE RAVAGERS – Writer: Howard Mackie. Artist: Ian Churchill. Spinning off from Teen Titans and Superboy , this series finds four superpowered teens on the run and fighting against the organisation that wants to turn them into supervillains.

These will all be launching in May.