This week DC Comics relaunched an obscure superhero title called Dial H for Hero. The original series ran from 1966–1968 as a feature in DC’s House of Mystery. Its premise was that each time the precocious teenager Robby Reed dialed the letters O-R-E-H into a mystical rotary dial telephone, he became a new and different superhero for a few hours, each time with a new name, powers, and costume. The series had two reboots in 1981 and 2003 that were even shorter-lived than the original. Admittedly, it’s a comic only the dorkiest of the dorky have cared about. But its third reboot has a distinctly radical flavor.

What makes the new Dial H exciting is that its left-wing science fiction and fantasy author China Miéville’s first foray into the world of comics. Miéville describes himself as an “actual, genuine Trotskyist,” has served on the central committee of the British Socialist Workers Party, and stood as a candidate for Parliament on a left unity ticket in 2001. And while these particular sectarian credentials might naturally lead many of us to skepticism, he’s actually quite young and hip.

Miéville writes left politics into the DNA of baroque fantasy novels. The series that made him famous (among geeks anyway) is his Bas-Lag trilogy, set in a world the Believer called, “Middle Earth meets Dickensian London on really good acid.” Perdido Street Station, the first in the series, is primarily a surreal admixture of a crime and horror story aesthetically colored with steampunk, fantastical pseudoscience, and captivating if unsettling baroquerie.