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Dial H
for HERO |
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| Alias: Chris King |
Titans West Member/Ally
joined Hawk & Dove Annual (second series) # 1 [1990] |
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| Chris King Quick Bio: When Chris King and Vicki Grant stumbled upon two mystical dials, they discovered they would transform into a different super-powered persona each time they dialed H-E-R-O! When Vicki went rogue, Chris sought the Titans for help. Since then, King has learned to internalize his transformations and aids the Titans when called. |
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CHRIS KING |
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LEFT: Chris King meets the Titans in NEW TEEN TITANS (second series) #45 [1988].
BOTTOM: Chris is called in JLA/TITANS #2 [1999].
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Dial O for Origin
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| Chris King asks the Titans for help in NEW TEEN TITANS (second series) #45 [1988]. |
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Chris King is quite literally the hero of a thousand faces. Each time he goes into action, he has a new and completely different identity and powers, conjured up entirely at random in a pattern that never repeats itself.
The origins of Chris's powers stretch back over ten years, to the day a teenager named Robby Reed accidentally fell into a subterranean cavern. There, Robby discovered a strange device shaped like a telephone dial and inscribed with an extraterrestrial language. The dial had ten spaces; each labeled with an alien letter. Robby, a child prodigy, deciphered enough of the inscriptions to be able to dial the alien equivalent of the letters H-E-R-O, which instantly transformed him into a super-hero called Giant-Boy. The change wore off when he dialed O-R-E-H, and each time thereafter that Robby used the dial to fight crime, he became a completely different costumed character, each with his own strange and marvelous power.
Robby's career ended abruptly when he was forced into dialing S-P-L-I-T during a case and became two people - the benevolent Wizard and the evil Master, who hid the H-dial and began creating an army of super-villains with which to rule me world. In order to combat the Master, the Wizard built two new H-dials and lured two teenagers - Chris King and Vicki Grant - into finding them and discovering their wonderful powers. Unlike the heroic identities conjured up by the original dial, Chris and Vicki's transformations lasted only one hour, but each dial still allowed its wearer to enjoy a new and completely random super-hero form each time it was used.
Chris and Vicki baffled numerous super-villains in their hometown of Fairfax; many of them created by Robby Reed's evil alter-ego. During their final confrontation with the Master, the Wizard - who had finally found the original H-dial - intervened and reunited with the Master, at last allowing Robby to return to normal. Though Chris and Vicki's mission to oppose the Master was now complete, Robby allowed them to keep their dials and gave his own to their friend, Nick Stevens.
Dial T for Titans
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Bad Girl: Evil Vicki Grant - under the influence of the Children of the Sun -
vexes Chris King in NEW TEEN TITANS (second series) #46 [1988]. |
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After their high-school graduation, Vicki moved to San Francisco and fell in with a bad crowd. She was eventually recruited and corrupted by the evil Children of the Sun, who taught her how to draw the power of the dial into herself. Now motivated towards destruction for destruction's sake, she decided to use her powers to kill Chris. She would have succeeded had the New Titans not intervened. With their help, Chris escaped Vicki's wrath; when she fled, he vowed to someday find her and help her reform.
Chris had formed some sort of psychic link with the H-dial himself and no longer relied on it for his transformations. Now once an hour, he automatically can assume a new super-hero form, which he maintains until he expends a predetermined amount of physical energy. He is currently being monitored at S.T.A.R. Labs in San Francisco, where scientists are trying to determine the exact method by which these transformations take place. He made several new friends when he helped Hawk and Dove and the members of the ad hoc group Titans West retrieve a team of scientists from another dimension.
After that time, Vicki Grant encountered Hero Cruz, who had acquired her H-dial by accident. She first savagely attacked Hero, but was then reunited with her dial. Once she dialed, she was able to change back into normal Vicki Grant. Shaken from her experience, Vicki stayed with the family of Sparx (of the Ravers) to recuperate.
Chris King aided the Titans again during the Technis Imperative conflict, which involved the Justice League as well as all Titans, past and present. Chris has chosen to pursue a career in sports medicine and now attends UCLA. Fellow H-dialer Hero Cruz has sought his help in learning greater control over the H-dial transformations.
Each hour, Chris King involuntarily and automatically transforms into a new superhero. Each persona has its own name and powers, which he somehow knows instinctively the moment he changes. No matter what his powers may be during any given hour, Chris returns to normal after using a specific amount of energy; in other words, the more he uses his powers, the faster they "bum up." Chris wears a special suit designed by S.T.A.R. technicians, which feeds information about his transformations directly into their computers.
DC Secret Files, supplemented by titanstower.com
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Dial "H" Chronology
History courtesy of Amazing Heroes
The New Concept
In contrast to the Robby Reed series, the new Dial "H" for Hero stories - at least the initial ones - were by a writer and artist as well known as Wood, Miller, and Mooney were obscure - Marv Wolfman and Carmine Infantino. With the exception of the basic concept, the characters and background owed very little to Robby's; they were a lot closer to the main characters in Nova, on which Wolfman and Infantino had previously collaborated for Marvel. Dial "H" For Hero featured a teenage boy (Chris King) who lived with his parents and kid brother and was the favorite victim of the class bully. Unlike Robby, Chris didn't seem to be near the top of his class, though he was equally shy. Even so, on his first day in a new school, one of the prettiest (and richest!) girls in his class, Vicki Grant, took the initiative and asked him out - perhaps indicative of how society has changed between 1967 and 1981. But with luck like that, who needs an H-Dial?
Beginnings: Legion of Super-heroes #272
Originally featuring Robby Reed, "Dial H for Hero" had run in House of Mystery during the 1960s. Marv Wolfman adapted the idea here, with a boy and a girl finding magic dials that would transform them into a different super-hero every time they dialed the word 'hero' - All the heroes and villains were designed by readers and were featured in short and simplistic stories. Chris King and Vicki Grant first appeared in a preview in Legion of Super-heroes #272. They had a regular back-up in Adventure Comics from Adventure #479-490. Adventure was cancelled with 490, but later revived as a 100-page digest-sized comic containing one new story and numerous reprints.
Adventure Feature: Adventure Comics #479-490
Chris and Vicki found not one but two H-Dials in the attic of his family's new house - one for each of them. These dials were much smaller than Robby's, conveniently camouflaging themselves as a watch and a locket when not in use - and they have only the four letter H-E-R-O on them (no worries about any more Daffy Dagans, and Vicki's worked just fine without the feminine suffix). Otherwise they operated just the same as Robby's: HERO turned them into heroes, and O-R-E-H changed them back. However, Robby's occasional weakness of not being able to dial a new hero right after dialing back became permanent for Chris and Vicki. And they were given the additional weakness of reverting back to their normal forms after an hour, even without dialing O-R-E-H.
Initially, the most serious drawback of the new Dial "H" series was DC's insistence on dividing each issue into three short stories. Even though they may have been linked by threads of continuity, each tale featured different heroes (and usually villains). According to Wolfman, this was an attempt to squeeze as many different readers' contributions as possible into the same issue, but in practice it allowed each hero an average of only two or three pages of action. The constricted format made it very difficult to fit in any subplots or character development. Wolfman tried, but none of Chris and Vicki's classmates or teachers were more than stereotypes.
It also ran a serious risk of alienating the vast majority of readers who didn't contribute - and irritating even the minority-within-a-minority of those, who did and got their concepts accepted, by failing to use their creations to anything near their full potential. Some issues had heroes appear for only a single panel.
In later issues, the originators Wolfman and Infantino were able to use longer stories, but by this time the strip was clearly on the wane. Carmine Infantino's art quickly gave way to that of Don Heck and Trevor Von Eeden. Nor did Marv Wolfman remain with the strip for very long: he was replaced by Bob Rozakis and E. Nelson Bridwell, who experimented with several different styles of collaboration before settling down to their current arrangement, where Rozakis provides the dialogue for Bridwell's plots. There was also greater experimentation with the format, and several issues of Adventure featured longer stories, but by then it was too late. Adventure Comics Featuring Dial "H" for Hero simply was not selling and was actually cancelled after four decades of publication, before sentiment brought it back in its current format of a largely-reprint digest.
Superboy Back-Up: New Adventures of Superboy #28-49
That would have been the end for the Dial "H" revival too, except that Jenette Kahn still wanted to keep the strip going, especially since there had been serious talk of a Saturday morning cartoon based on it. The cartoon, like the comic book feature, would have used characters created by readers and viewers, although if the idea was to be used to its fullest advantage, its production schedule would have had to vary from that of most new cartoons, which generally make 14 or fewer episodes at the very beginning of a season and then rerun the same episodes for a year. or more. So Dial "H" for Hero survives as a very short back-up feature in The New Adventures of Superboy. Its page page count has been steadily decreasing, and it's rarely had any opportunity to live up to its full potential in a mere seven pages. The unspectacular but often innovative art of Heck and Von Eeden has in turn given way at first to Alex Saviuk (a staple of Julius Schwartz's backup strips), and then former Richie Rich artist Howard Bender. With back-up features being increasingly on the decline at DC, and no further word of a cartoon adaptation, it would seem that the revival's days are numbered.
Yet Dial "H" for Hero, in both its versions, was an original and clever idea, In the [Marv Wolfman] version, it also has the welcome side benefit of encouraging readers to use their own imagination.
Submitting Those Dial H Heroes
There's been a great deal of derision in fan circles toward the only compensation the creators of all these "potentially lucrative" characters appearing in Dial "H" For Hero receive: a T-shirt with a stylized dial bearing the DC symbol and the sentence "I dialed ‘H' For Hero."
It may not seem like much in these days of arguments and lawsuits over creators' rights, but it's more than the creators of the bits of Legionnaire business and Katy Keene's clothes ever got. The real thrill to most contributors lies in the use of their creations in print. The T-shirt in merely a bonus.
More relevant criticism has been directed at the release form all contributors are required to sign, which grants DC total and permanent rights to such contributions. However, some of the terms of the release (such as those granting DC rights even to unused submissions, for which no consideration - either publication or a T-shirt - is given) are totally unenforceable, as would be obvious to anyone with a background in contract and copyright law. The other terms are no more than the same releases every professional creator must sign - and which aren't always enforced as written. The company does pay royalties on reprints and on any outside merchandising income received on characters created after 1976 or so (one reason several former Marvel writers have given J for being more willing to create new characters for DC).
Wolfman has stated that DC Publisher Jenette Kahn's original intent was to treat the creator of any Dial "H" submission that becomes successful enough to warrant reuse or merchandising the same way as any other professional creator. Wolfman has further said that DC is seeking "to be fair" and draw up contracts to "re-buy" characters for more than one use, even though the company seems to feel assured it has full rights of ownership to all the Dial "H" characters it uses.
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Titans West: Aborted Plans
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WOULD-BE TITANS WEST MEMBERSHIP:
Cyborg, Red Star, Chris King, and Thunder & Lightning |
[from Amazing Heroes #135, 1988 Ð A Marv Wolfman Interview]
In 1988, Marv Wolfman set the stage for a new Titans West. The New Teen Titans had an adventure with Chris [Dial 'H'] King and Red Star. At the same time, Sarah Charles relocated to the West Coast, and Vic Stone thought about moving with her. Those three would have comprised the core of the Titans West team.
Marv Wolfman notes, "I was talking about the West Coast version of the book, that would be in San Francisco. [...] DC wants to do a West Coast Teen Titans. In the last run of the book, before I did it, it was Titans East and Titans West. It was a regular feature that pre-dated West Coast Avengers by about ten years. They want to revive that. They asked me if I wanted to write it, or would let someone else write it. Well, I want to control the Titans; I think one of the problems with Spotlight was that I really didn't do any. I think that's the reason that led to it eventually being cancelled. There was no sense of urgency to the stories, as good as some of them were. There was no sense of the stories having any effect on the characters. The fact that it lasted 25 issues, I think, is a testimony to the characters themselves- that people still cared about them.
"I will handle all the Titan work. That way there's a continuity between what I write in one place and another. So the stuff will have some meaning as a whole to the book. All of it will feed in on itself, which is the way it should be. It's for that same reason I decided to do the West Coast version."
"Cyborg will be moving to the West Coast. Red Star, who is a re-named Starfire from Russia, will be a member of it. Chris King, who is one of the Dial "H"for Hero character that I had done, and I just reintroduced him to the regular Titans book, he'll be a member. So we actually have a character who, every time you see him, will be different. "
Try, Try Again
[from Comics Scene Magazine #8, 1989 - an article with George Pérez and Marv Wolfman]
One detail that has yet to be worked out is just which of the two will ultimately handle the Titans' twin title, Titans West.
"We'll probably do the first issue together whenever that finally comes about. Then, depending on George's schedule, he may take over the book.
"I didn't want another young superhero book," Wolfman notes. "The concept that I had come up with was more of a rescue group-not another bunch of policemen running out and stopping crime-working out of San Francisco. Just before George returned, I set up the San Francisco branch of STAR. Labs as a place where they're testing super-people. We had Red Star and Thunder and Lightning out there, and some other characters that we were going to introduce. When the Titans West, or whatever it's finally called, is formed, they'll operate out of that, and there will be positive charter in the helping in disastrous situations.
"Now that I'm coming back as a writer in my mind after a couple of years where I wasn't too pleased with everything, I don't want to overdose on Titans. I want to really enjoy what I'm writing so that each issue, when I sit down, I can approach it at the strongest, as opposed to saying, 'Oh, no. Another Titans story.' So, if George decides at some point not to write Titans West, at least it'll be so completely different from Titans that I wouldn't be bored."
Last Gasps
[from Comics Scene Magazine #11, 1990 - an article with George Pérez]
Another Titans project is the often-mentioned Titans West series. Pérez says it's still planned. "One of the stories that Marv discussed was a mystery story in which the Titans are missing. That could lead to the introduction or reintroduction of the Titans West set of characters. Then, I would be the writer of the second Titans book if reader interest warrants a second title. It also depends on whether I have the time to write it, or if I would be better off on another title I could write and draw.
"I'm not interested in doing a monthly series anymore," Pérez sighs. "I can't do one and do my best work. I used to be able to be satisfied with the work I did on a monthly basis. Now, I look at it and say, "Ahh, it's not really the best I can do,' and I don't want people to think it's my best, either. I hope to do mini-series, maxi-series, graphic novels. I really enjoy inking other people. I just finished inking a Carmine Infantino story for Secret Origins, "Space Museum.' I'm slated to be the regular inker on Titans over Tom Grummett. It's not all Pérez anymore, but at least Pérez has the last word, as every inker does. But, that means finding a penciller who doesn't mind my having the last word. I'm very faithful to pencillers, but I'm extravagant when it comes to extra detail I toss in."
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Legion of Super-heroes #272 [1979] : Preview of "Dial H for H-E-R-O" First appearances of Chris King and Vicki Grant
Adventure #479-490 [1979-1980]: "Dial H for H-E-R-O" back-up features.
New Adventures of Superboy #28-49: "Dial H for H-E-R-O" back-up features.
New Teen Titans (second series) #45-46 [1988]: Chris [Dial H for HERO] King is being chased by an insane and vengeful Vicki [Dial H for HERO] Grant, his former girlfriend. It is revealed that the Children of the Sun abducted Vicki and taught her how to draw the power of the dial into herself. Now motivated towards destruction for destruction's sake, she decides to use her powers to kill Chris King - until the New Titans intervene and save him. First appearance of the Children of the Sun, post-Crisis.
Hawk & Dove Annual (second series) #1 [1990]: featured a brief reunion of Titans West. A mysterious note to Dawn Granger leads to Hawk and Dove teaming up with the old Titans West crew, with Hawk, Dove, Flamebird, Bumblebee, Mal, Golden Eagle and Chris "Dial H" King forming a rag-tag Titans West team. Flamebird suggested reforming the team, but no one was interested.
New Titans #83-84 [1991]: Chris King is shown as a captive of the Wildebeest Society in issues #83-84.
JLA/Titans #2 [1998]: Chris King aids the Titans in JLA/Titans #2.
The Titans Secret Files #2 [2000]: It's the debut of Titans LA in an astonishing all-new Special. Whether he wants it or not, Beast Boy finds himself saddled with a new West Coast branch of the Titans. But it may be the new team's final appearance as well if Fear and Loathing and the madcap Harlequin have their say. First Titans L.A. Chris King attends membership drive of Titans LA; It is revealed that Chris King has been helping Hero Cruz master his H-dial. It is also revealed that Chris King is attending UCLA and majoring in sports medicine.
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