March 13, 2023
Profesor José Alaniz has just released a new comics collection titled The Compleat Moscow Calling (Amatl Comix). The book, which had its official debut at the BIPOC POP Symposium and Arts Expo at UT Austin in March, collects Moscow Calling, a comic strip which first appeared in the 1990s in the English-language newspaper The Moscow Tribune while Alaniz worked in Russia as a journalist. For this collection, Alaniz completed the strip’s storyline as a graphic novella, along with other material, including the comics short story “Mariupol,” devoted to the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Alaniz, a comics scholar and professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle, has previously published Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (2010, University Press of Mississippi); Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (UPM, 2014) and Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia (Ohio State University Press, 2022), among other works.
He released his first comics collection, The Phantom Zone and Other Stories (Amatl Comix) in 2020. His comics have also appeared in The Stranger, the Seattle anthology Dune, Tales From La Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology (2018), BorderX: A Crisis in Graphic Detail (2020) and SCARFFF.
Amatl Comix site: https://amatlcomix.sdsu.edu/