Comics / Comics News

China Mieville Writes Dial H: What Does This Mean for Comics?

By Dan Horn
January 18, 2012 - 11:58

Out of all of the newly announced titles coming from DC in May, I'm perhaps most excited to hear that China Mieville, award-winning author of The City and the City and Embassytown, is going to be writing comics for DC, reimagining and reinvigorating the obscure Dial H for HERO comic book series, and I think this is in many ways more significant than Harlan Ellison getting involved in The Avengers for a story arc or Orson Scott Card writing Ultimate Iron Man.

I say that not to diminish the impact either of those writers have had on English literature, specifically genre fiction, because they're two of the most important and accomplished authors of the late twentieth century, but if you take a look at the literature industry today, and maybe as far back as twenty-five/thirty years ago, publications that feed into counter culture have really dried up and withered away. What we have now is the book market being absolutely flooded with watered down pop fiction and propaganda pieces. There doesn't consistently exist a sort of subversive, against-the-grain genre that informs consumer culture, that challenges consumer culture, or that offends consumer culture.

There's, however, a burgeoning literary movement dubbed the "New Weird" which I think is poised to fill that literary counter culture niche, and at its helm is China Mieville. The comic book industry has always had a great potential to disseminate counter culture art and literature, and decades ago it did serve that purpose very successfully, but now even most independent publishers are more focused on creating their own stable of mainstream, marketable ideas than they are on fostering new, groundbreaking, subversive content.

 

Something I heard recently was indicative of this. I was listening to some other comic book podcast a few months ago, and the guys on the show had a listener call in who said he had just read a comic book that he felt really changed his life and he was wondering what comics the podcast hosts had read that had affected their worldview or sensibilities in some way, which elicited a bunch of heeing and hawing from the hosts. They start saying things like, "Books have changed my life, but I don't think I've ever read a comic book that's affected me in some profound way." They were acting like it was totally preposterous that a comic book could be anything more than lighthearted escapism. And I'm just sitting there saying, well then why the fuck are you hosting an hour long podcast about nothing but comic books every week, and why are you blogging everyday about nothing but comic books. But really, I think that was some sort of painfully accurate commentary on the comic book industry.  I think the last comic book I read where I really felt challenged was Grant Morrison's The Filth, which in all reality is just kind of an updated and illustrated Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. But The Filth really just made me emotionally sick, and it introduced all of these strange new ideas into my impressionable young mind, and I felt like a veil had been lifted. That came out--what--ten years ago?

Comic books have the power to subvert and change belief structures like no other medium, no matter what negative stigmas the label "comic book" carries with it, and I really hope Mieville's unique voice isn't censored by DC, whose parent company Time-Warner supports SOPA and PIPA. It's already quite obvious that China's had to tone down his work to get his foot in the door at DC, after having a politically-charged Swamp Thing pitch rejected. I think, if he sticks to his socialist ideals, he could be much more significant than the next Alan Moore or pre-mainstream Grant Morrison, and he could achieve that status during a time when it's crucial to the common man to have a counter culture leader like that.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12