Thank god they don't run TV stations in the same way they run comics publishers.  Imagine a BBC entirely devoted to edgy revivals of crap old shows.  Neil Gaiman's Triangle.  Ultimate Are You Being Served.

But in comics, you just can't stop the two main publishers from dusting off ancient old ideas and trying to give them a modern twist.  So here comes H-E-R-O, a twenty-first century revival of Dial H For Hero.  On my list of things I'd like to see revived, Dial H For Hero ranks somewhere below the career of Whigfield, and the rather low order figures for this first issue suggest that I might not be the only one.

This is written by Will Pfeifer, who's best known for the Vertigo miniseries Finals.  Conventional wisdom is that Finals was a fabulous satire book.  Personally, I thought it was a one-trick pony and massively overrated.  So we're really not off to a good start here.

The Hero Dial, you may remember, was a thing which you could dial to turn yourself into a superhero.  Jerry Feldon stumbles onto the Dial while working in a cafe, and decides to try it out.  And it turns him into a superhero.  But as he tries to do heroic stuff, things don't quite work out as planned.

There's not much of a plot here - it's largely an introduction to Jerry as a character.  Jerry's dominant character trait is that he's a suicidally depressed loser.  And the story runs through the usual key points used to establish why somebody would be suicidal - no friends, bad job, etc etc.  It also throws in the idea that he has a chronic inferiority complex because he can't measure up to Superman, whom he saw once when he was standing in a crowd of bystanders.

It never quite rings true to me, though.  Everyone in the DC Universe is inferior to Superman, and I never get a clear sense of why Jerry takes it so personally.  Most of the rest is just stock material for depressed characters.  The problem, I think, is that Pfeifer is trying to set up a psychological issue for his protagonist which the Hero Dial can play into.  But the result is a stock character with a bolted-on superhero obsession that's hard to identify with.  And stock depressive characters aren't all that easy to empathise with.

The intended tone seems to be black comedy, and the book does more or less manage to incorporate the ridiculous Hero Dial, and a consciously generic superhero design for the lead, into a generally grim and downbeat atmosphere.  But a story about a man who wants to kill himself really isn't all that funny, and the result is an awkward mixture of tones.  At best, Pfeifer is trying to use the Hero Dial in a serious story here, and I just can't buy anything that camp working in this context.

Kano's artwork is excellent, though - it does create a grimy and rainsodden world where the superhero elements can co-exist, and he does go a long way to breathing life into the lead character.  I'm impressed by him, and I'm tempted to stick around for a bit for the art.  But the story doesn't do anything for me.

Rating: C+

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