I always feels a certain level of excitement when I pick up a new comic by an established prose writer who’s never tackled the medium before. The kind of feeling that I imagine people get when they play Russian Roulette. You know that you’re holding something that is at least potentially very powerful; you know it has to at least be competently written, because book publishers rarely chuck money at any dingbat with a copy of MS Word… unless they’re using it to run a find / replace on some Twilight slashfic.
However, just because someone can write a book doesn’t mean they can write a comic book. Sometimes you get Neil Gaiman and Sandman (Yes, Gaiman wrote a book before he broke into comics). Unfortunately, other times you get more Brad Meltzer on Justice League of America; Brad spent so many issues showng Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman looking at pictures of potential League members that I began to suspect they were masturbating under the table while they were doing it.
All of which is a long way to go to say that China Miéville’s first issue of the rebooted Dial H is a well-plotted comic with a thoroughly weird, yet engaging, twist on the book’s original concept of a telephone that turns whoever uses it into a superhero. And it is well-written, in the sense that the pure language is entertaining and just damn fun to read. It’s not perfect, but for a dude who’s never written a comic book before, it’s a decent start.
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