In 2003, Will Pfeifer and Kano dusted off the Dial H for Hero concept for the first time in. . . a while. Late '80s, maybe? After the initial, four-issue story focused on a young man in a decaying Rust Belt town who stumbles across the dial, Pfeifer and Kano spend the rest of the first issue on short, one or two-issue stories, as the dial bounces from one person to another. People discard it, people lose it, but there's always another curious person sooner or later who finds it and presses the buttons in the right order.
Rather than a phone dial as it was in the original stories and in China Mieville's version, Kano draws it as a metal disc with four buttons: "H" "E" "R" "O". Press them in that order, become a hero. Reverse the order, revert to normal. Some of the hero designs are fairly generic, blocky colors and masks, but there are some more creative designs. A young schoolgirl is able to dial up a woman with illusion powers that has a nifty hooded robe design, some guys who essentially use the dial to do Jackass stunt dial up a big metal dude at one point.
There's no sense that the dial responds to the desires or interests of its user in terms of which hero they become. Unlike with Mieville's Dial H, there's also no sense these heroes exist somewhere else. If one is dialed up, the dialer knows their codename, and may know their powers, but may not. The first guy makes the mistake of assuming he's invulnerable and tries to stop a moving car by standing in the way. It does not go well. There's also no apparent time limit, as the caveman above dialed in a hero and remained that way until his death.
The dial also doesn't seem to care how someone might use it. In Dial H, The Centipede couldn't use the dial, because he ultimately was not a hero. We already briefly mentioned the guys using it for dumb stunts, and there's one issue where a low-level henchguy in Gotham gets it and tries to go big time. But from the point when Dale Eaglesham takes over as series artist is spent on what happens if the wrong person gets the dial, and hits what Robby Reed calls, "the jackpot". Superman-level powers, in this case in the hands of a serial killer.
So the second year of the book shifts from shorter stories to a long arc as Reed, the original Dial H for Hero lead, gathers up some of the people who used the dial over the first year, to try and prevent a mess he foresaw with a hero he dialed years ago. This would seem hard to manage, but this version of the dial leaves people with a hint of the powers they gained from using it, even without dialing. Seems to be a feature unique to this version, although Mieville's had dialers retain memories of the heroes, which was more a problem than an advantage.
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