Dial H #2

China Miéville's wildly inventive New 52 series continues with this August 2012 issue, featuring a cover by Brian Bolland that perfectly captures the book's anything-goes energy. At its center sits an ordinary, bewildered-looking man surrounded by a genuinely strange gallery: a half-masked magician conjuring playing cards, a Napoleonic-era soldier clutching a cannonball, a roaring lion-headed figure wielding a staff, and a toxic green skeletal creature lurking at the lower left — all while a chaotic swarm of seabirds fills the sky above. The tagline "Power Up?" says it all, hinting that the H-Dial's unpredictable transformations are anything but under control.