Dial H #14, by China Mieville (writer) Alberto Ponticelli (penciler), Dan Green (inker), Tanya and Richard Horie (colorists), Taylor Esposito (letterer) - Bolland needs to stop drawing things that look so creepy, or I'm going to start getting nightmares. As it turns out, Roxie and Bansa can't fix the jump-dial they found on the graffiti world, so the team is stuck trying to find the same weak spots in dimensions to travel through they were using before. This is taking its toll. The team is losing members, as Ejad the robot is killed, and Yabba, Unbled, and Nem get separated from the rest. It's worse than that even, because all the worlds they visit now recognize dials and aren't happy to see them. They remember the war for the Exchange, and so does someone else: O. He's gotten his hands on one heck of a dial, one that can call down apocalypses, and he's turning it against all the dimensions he despises. Fortunately, the last world the Dial Bunch reaches has someone who knows how to fix the J-Dial, and is willing to give it back to them, after they help fend off a zombie infestation. Which brings the 4 heroes to the Exchange, where they find destruction. . . and the Centipede.
My perception of the history here keeps changing. I thought the war in the Exchange was between rival factions of those who lived there, but it seems more likely it was between the residents of the Exchange, and the people of all the dimensions that were having their powers dialed away and were sick of it. I had thought O was running from the Exchange for giving dials to "lesser" beings, Prometheus trying to evade the gods' wrath. But he seems to be angry not at the Exchange, but everyone else. I'm guessing it was his handing out dials that clued those people in to the existence of the Exchange, explained the death of some of their heroes, and that's what triggered the war. I'm not sure. You can feel Mieville having to speed things up to beat the cancellation clock. I doubt the Dial Bunch was supposed to lose half its members in one issue, especially since we'd still only gotten to know a couple of them. It's still an entertaining story, but I'm frustrated thinking how much better it would be if Mieville and Ponticelli had the time to build it up properly
Ponticelli draws the frog people as simply frogs wearing clothes, rather than the hybrid human-frogs Bolland went with. Fine with me, Ponticelli's version is much less freaky looking. The heroes are still suitably strange looking. A moving pipe cleaner? I don't understand SuperOmi, Queen of Soho, though.
I don't know how the finale is going to play out, though I'm hoping my schedule will give me the chance to find out this week.
Hawkeye #12, by Matt Fraction (writer), Francesco Francavilla (artist), Chris Eliopoulos (letterer) - You figure it's significant that Hawkeye isn't positioned over the dead center of the bullseye in the background?I was only vaguely aware Clint even had a brother, had no idea he tried to play at being Hawkeye, or that Clint stole his money. At any rate, Barney Barton's in town to look up his brother. He makes an appointment to meet with Clint, and when that falls through, tries to bum some change from the bros watching the apartment building. They agree to pay him 5 bucks if they can punch him in the face, then welch on the bet. This makes Barney the guy Lucky tried rescuing from a beating the previous issue because he thought it was Clint. The bros return in force later with a roll of bills in exchange for five minutes of Barney playing punching bag. They try to welch again, Barney beats them up and claims his money. He confirms Clint was too vague in when they were supposed to meet, but they do meet up at the end of the issue. Barney even uses a line from Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Oh, and there are some flashbacks to his and Clint's family life growing up.
I really like the color work Francavilla does. There's always a sort of pattern to the page. Take page 4, 9 panel grid. The top row and the center column are all reds, oranges and blacks. Forms a nice "T" of stupid bros and violence, and the red is more intense in the panels with actual punching. It gets deeper the farther down the page you go. The other panels are mostly yellow backgrounds and a grey violet color for Barney, except for the last panel, where Lucky comes in and the background flips to a light blue.
There's the fight between Clint and on pages 7 and 8, where Clint and Barney are in yellows while they're goofing around, and in the final panel of page 7, everything is yellow, except their booze guzzling, about to explode father, who's in red (and whose face is completely in shadow, in contrast to everyone else). On the next page, pops starts in yellow, then shifts to red as his anger begins to spill out, and Clint shifts to red to match. His mother is still in yellow, except for the red on the napkin she's dabbing at her bloody nose with.
That's followed up with Barney teaching Clint how to punch later than night. That whole sequence is in deep blues and blacks, and as the story shifts back to the present (where Barney sleeps in an alley as the bros doth approach), the blue persists around him, even as the yellow of the present (a more pure yellow, less orange than in the flashbacks) intrudes on the scene. The blue stays on Barney even after the bros start hitting him and the background shifts to pure red. Like he's stuck in the past, remembering Clint taking on their dad or something.
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