A review by shane_tiernan
Dial H, Vol. 2: Exchange by China Miéville, Alberto Ponticelli, Dan Green

3.0

I love a lot of China Mieville's writing mostly because of the originality. You'll never find a dwarf or an elf in his fantasy stuff and his non-fantasy stuff is even stranger than his fantasy stuff. The problem with this series is the same as other attempts at originality - sometimes it just gets too weird. The other problem, for me because I'm American, is that I think much of the humor was British, so I didn't get it. Like the hero "Cock-a-hoop" basically a rooster with a hula hoop, which I just looked up and it says "British" before it. So the humor fell flat sometimes for me. If the heroes were only in a frame or 2 no big deal but "Open Window Man" ended up being a main character and he just looked so stupid it was distracting from the really cool plot.

Anyway, I loved the plot, I loved the 2 main characters, but things often got incomprehensible and there were silly heroes. That puts this firmly in 3-star territory for me. Which is disappointing because I was really hoping I would love it.