Dial H for Hero
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Dial H for Hero is a comic book feature published by DC Comics about a mysterious dial that enables an ordinary person to become a superhero for a short time. The dial causes its possessor to become a new superhero with a different name, costume and powers each time it is used. These superheroes are usually brand-new, but on one occasion the dial caused its owner to become a duplicate of an existing superhero, Plastic Man.
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[edit] Original series
The original series appeared in the House of Mystery comic book in the late 1960s, in issues #156-173. The art was by artist Jim Mooney, the stories by writer Dave Wood.The original owner of the dial was Robert "Robby" Reed, a teenager from Littleville, Colorado, who discovered the dial in a cavern. Resembling an old telephone dial, this device was hand-held and covered in unknown symbols (that somehow Robby was able to understand as modern letters.) Its origin is still unrevealed. By dialing the letters H-E-R-O, Robby would turn into a superpowered being; dialing O-R-E-H made him revert to his normal form. He quickly used it to protect Littleville under the guises of numerous superheroes. Robby Reed also appeared in a couple of other DC titles during this time.
Robby's H-Dial was once used by his foe, "Daffy" Donovan, who briefly became a supervillain after dialing V-I-L-L-A-I-N. Robby's girlfriend Suzie also used the dial once, dialing H-E-R-O-I-N-E to temporarily transform into Gem Girl.
Robby lent the Dial to the Justice League on one occasion, allowing several of its members to transform into new superheroes to defeat the Injustice League at a time when they had learned how to defeat the Leaguers in their normal forms.
[edit] 1980s series
The second DIAL H FOR HERO series debuted in the 1980s, in a special insert in Legion of Super-Heroes No. 272, then ran in Adventure Comics #479-490 and continued in New Adventures of Superboy #28-49. A big feature of this new series was that the readers submitted new hero and villain characters, which were then used in the stories. The submitters were given credit for their creations (but the characters became DC Comic's property.) The original writer and artist in the series were Marv Wolfman and Carmine Infantino.
In this series, two other dials are discovered years later by teenagers Christopher "Chris" King and Victoria "Vicky" Grant of the New England town of Fairfax in a 'haunted' house. These dials -a watch and a necklace- only had the letters H-E-R-O on them, and worked only for an hour, after which they would not work for another hour. King and Grant began protecting Fairfax from a number of menaces. Unknown to them, most of these villains were created by a mysterious villain known only as The Master.
It must be noted that, while anyone could use Chris and Vicki's H-dials, they always turned the user into a hero, regardless of his or her personality; even The Master was temporarily made good by one. This fact has been ignored in later stories.
Eventually Chris and Vicki discover that a fellow student named Nick Stevens has been drawing up superheroes as a hobby- and somehow, the dials turned them into those heroes. With Nick's help, they find out that their dials were created by a being called The Wizard (who should not be confused with the DC Comics villain of the same name), whom the Master thought he'd killed years before. In truth, the Wizard faked his death while he looked for the original Hero Dial. With it, he merged with The Master- and transformed into Robby Reed, who explained that he had split in two using the dial years before so The Master could disarm a deadman switch, while The Wizard defeated the villain. (The exclusion of letters other than H-E-R-O on Chris's and Vicki's dials was due to a subconscious desire of the Wizard's to prevent what had happened to Robby from happening to the recipients of the new H-dials; this, however, did not prevent Chris from experimenting on one occasion and dialing H-O-R-R-O-R, with disastrous results.) Robby then gave his dial to Nick, and retired as a hero.
[edit] Other appearances
As an epilogue of sorts to the Chris King/Vicki Grant Dial H series, which ended in The New Adventures of Superboy #49, issue #50 of that series featured a story in which the watch once used by Chris King was stolen from the Space Museum of the Legion of Super-Heroes' time period by a thief named Nylor Truggs, who fled with the dial to the ambigous late 1960s/early 1970's era-Smallville of the original (Earth-One) Superboy by altering the dial's functions in some unexplained manner that allowed him to travel in time. Truggs further altered the H-dial to break the restriction that users would only transform into heroic identities, changing the "H" in the center of the dial to "V" for "villain". Truggs also made the dial capable of changing individuals other than himself into villains if he desired; those transformed would then be under Truggs' control. Truggs transformed several of Clark Kent's high school friends this way and used them, as well as a temporary alliance with a teenaged Lex Luthor, in a scheme to plant seismic devices in their time period so that Truggs could use those devices against the people of his own future time upon his return. Truggs' plan was foiled by Superboy, several members of the Legion (who had travelled to that time period to apprehend the thief), and Superboy's Kryptonian pet, Krypto the Superdog, the latter of destroyed the stolen H-Dial by tearing it from Truggs' wrist and crushing it in his jaws. (Note that this story was published before the events of the mini-series Crisis on Infinite Earths radically altered the established history of the DC Universe. Though most, if not all, of the Chris King/Vicki Grant stories were incorporated into post-Crisis continuity, the Earth-One Superboy was eliminated, and the Legion's history was altered several times over. Thus, in post-Crisis continuity, the above story likely did not happen.)
![Chris King and Vicki Grant in New Teen Titans (second series) #46 [1988]](../../../upload/1/15/Chriskingandvickigrant.JPG)
Years later, Victoria and Chris gained the ability to transform without the dials -apparently because of their extensive use- but it started causing them mental problems. Vicky joined a cult, where she was physically and mentally abused, deranging her even more. With help from the Teen Titans, Chris rescued her.
In the 1990s series Superboy and the Ravers Hero Cruz finds an H-dial in the lair of Scavenger. Later in the series, he is attacked for it by Victoria Grant, but manages to talk her down. She was last seen in the care of the Forces, a family of metahumans.
In a Legion of Super-Heroes story published at around the same time (but taking place 1000 years in the future) Lori Morning used an H-dial that was given to her by the Time Trapper.
In the early 2000s series H.E.R.O., Written by Will Pfeifer and featuring art by Kano, a similar dial is found by various other people, who each gain super powers in a similar manner to Reed, King, and Grant. Eventually, Reed appears in this series as well, raising the possibility that the dial featured in the series was in fact Reed's original dial.
The Cartoon Network series Ben 10 has a similar premise. In it, a boy finds an alien device capable of transforming him into various creatures, and he uses it to be a superhero.
