Since its debut in 1966, the so-called "H Dial" has been one of the most bizarre and unique items in the DC Comics Universe. An old rotary phone that gives bearers super powers when the dial H-E-R-O, the concept has bounced across half a dozen series and other appearances to deliver some of the most genre-bending characters in DC history.

And all of that legacy will come into play this week as writer Sam Humphries and artist Joe Quinones team up for an all-new Dial H for Hero as part of Brian Michael Bendis' Wonder Comics imprint. The H Dial itself recently reappeared in the pages of Action Comics, and now that it's loose in the DCU again, new trouble and new characters are just around the corner.

CBR spoke with Humphries and Quinones about the launch of the series, how they plan to incorporate concepts from both DC past and various comics genres into an interactive package, and why the story at the heart of the series offers an escape from mundane heroics in favor of an unseen aspect of H Dial history.

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CBR: I wanted to ask you guys how you felt about the concept of the Hero Dial. A while ago, I spoke with Brian Bendis who felt that this is an item that is perfect for the DCU. What did the device mean for you as you built this series, both conceptually and thematically?

Sam Humphries: There's a lot of things going on. One is that I started looking at the H Dial as a tool of transformation and escape and wish fulfillment. I thought about what that could do to a person – what they hoped it would do to them and what it would actually do to them. Then I thought about what it would do not just to the characters but also what it would do to the readers. How do we convey these feelings to the people holding a comic book? Baked into the concept of Dial H for HERO is the promise that there's a minimum of one brand-new superhero per issue. And that's really exciting because every month we have an opportunity to surprise the audience with a new character, a new costume, a new power set...all that stuff.

So what we wanted to do with this iteration of Dial H was take that even further. When a character on the page uses the H Dial, it doesn't just transform the character. It transforms the reading experience for the reader as well. You see that in the first issue with the introduction of Monster Truck. Not only does Joe's art style change, but so do the colors, and the lettering style changes. We have different narration style and dialogue, but also the storytelling style transforms. It's almost as though the comic itself was affected by the H Dial.

It was so exciting to think about the ways we could make the reader themselves feel a transformation as they're reading the comic book. Once we settled on that, the sky was the limit. Monster Truck is just the beginning of what we're going to be able to pull off in this comic. In issue #2 , things get bigger and crazier.

Joe Quinones: And it's also contingent on who is using the Hero Dial. It's not random or paint-by-numbers. The transformations are planned based on the characters who use it. And it can either make a lot of sense for that character or be a major contrast by design. But the use of the Dial is always unique to the user.

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Joe, how has it been having to reinvent your style for each of these sequences? I know my favorite part of Monster Truck in issue #1 was your use of '90s Quesada-esque signatures throughout the spread.

Quinones: I tried to sign everything as much as I could.

Humphries: The scroll! [Laughter]

It's funny because Dial H has its own legacy of doing really inventive and meta kinds of things. Here, you get to play with a different legacy from comics that we've seen in things like Alan Moore's 1963 where you're remixing classic styles of comics. Do you have a hit list of approaches you're wanting to work with, and will they go outside of superhero stuff to manga or anything else?

Quinones: Absolutely. That was one of our first conversations – could we do this or that. And then the fun became figuring out the ways those heroes and styles might interact with each other or overlap with each other. Because the narrative of the book changes with each transformation, what happens when you have two transformations on the same page? What happens then?

We're having fun with the form of comics and the wide variety of approaches that is out there. I think a lot of the choices we're making for the homage transformations are done because we love these things. These are comics that we grew up with or that we read now that really speak to us. We're putting this stuff in out of love, but the fun of it is to see the ways they can all bounce off each other.

Humphries: In a lot of ways Dial H for Hero is the result of conversations Joe and I have been having together for years now. They started off as us being two big nerds and going, "Remember when this comic happened? That's so cool!" By the time we started working on the book, we already had this shared language or our own venn diagram of things that were in the middle for both of us. Dial H for Hero is a once-in-a-career opportunity for us to play with comics in this way. We're really going for it on this one.

And I think we can at least say that while we have Monster Truck as one style in the first issue, and for issue #2 there's not just one manga style but two manga styles. These two different styles will collide on the same page and will even appear in the same panel together. Then in issue #3, we're upping the ante even more.

One of the things I'm most thrilled about in this book is that people think they know Joe Quinones. They think they know what he's all about. And he's got this beautiful style that people have been seeing, but he's also been sitting on allllll these different styles that he can do. He's been waiting for the right opportunity to unleash them like secret weapons, and this series is the perfect time to do that.

NEXT PAGE: Like The DC Universe, Dial H for Hero is All About Legacy

h-dial
Brian Bolland artwork from DC's 2016 Dial H series

CBR: Let's talk about the story of the book. Miguel and Summer are our leads at the start, and they come from very different backgrounds themselves, but that idea of escape seems to apply to both. What made them the perfect bearers for the Dial at this point?

Humphries: That's where the legacy of Dial H for Hero comes in. The DC Universe is all about legacy. Legacy is its beating heart. The legacy of the H Dial is that anybody can pick it up and use it, and each run of the book has featured a different protagonist or set of protagonists who experience the Dial from different perspectives. Right off the bat, we knew we wanted to have new characters at the center of this book.

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You're right that Miguel and Summer occupy different squares on the alignment chart, but what they have in common is something that the H Dial speaks directly to – this idea of transformation and escape. Miguel is stuck in a terrible family situation in a small town. He's been acting out by becoming more daring and doing backyard wrestling or more and more crazy jumps on his bike. The H Dial to him is not just the next level but like 12 levels up. If you grew up and the coolest guy on your block drove a TransAm, you'd say, "If only I had a TransAm for one hour." But in this situation, the coolest guy on the block is Superman, and the TransAm is super powers. That amps up the potential for transformation, but it also affects the idea of escape and the potential for disaster as well.

You're also playing with a lot of the core heroes of the DCU. Oftentimes, the versions of Dial H that have come out haven't pulled in the marquee heroes as much. In issue #1 we see a lot of characters become activated in some ways when the Dial resurfaces. Who came up with the list of characters to include here, and who insisted that Angel and the Ape be on it?

Humphries: [Laughs] That page of characters mirrors almost directly a list that Joe sent me when I asked "Who do you want to draw, even if it's just for one panel?"

Quinones: Yeah, I said "Can I do Alfred from the Diet Coke commercial featuring Batman?" [Laughter]

Humphries: One of the great things about Wonder Comics is that we get to have our cake and eat it, too. We get to have a new approach to superhero stories, and you've already seen that in action in Young Justice and Naomi and Wonder Twins. But we're also connected to the DCU. These books are in continuity. We definitely wanted to lean into that and integrate the concept of the H Dial and the potential it represents into continuity. We're playing with the idea that even in DC time, the H Dial has been around for years now, so there's an untold number of people who have used it. It's not just the three or four protagonists we've had in the previous runs. And if you use the H Dial, it leaves a mark on you. And depending on who you are, it's either going to improve the rest of your life or send you downhill.

And we thought it'd be interesting if some of those people are so desperate to get their hands on this thing again and get that hour back where they're super just one more time, they would ban together and make something called the Thunderbolt Club. Every time the H Dial is used, everyone who's used it before can feel it in their head. That's what you see on that page. Everyone there from Angel and the Ape to Harley Quinn to Lobo has used the Dial at some point before. Those are all stories waiting to be told. We're also going to explore what's happened to normal people who have used the Dial. But mostly, I just want to see what Lobo did with the Dial. [Laughter]

Dial H for Hero #1 is in stores this week from DC Comics' Wonder Comics imprint.