Amatl Comix · a San Diego State University Press imprint

THE COMPLEAT
MOSCOW CALLING

by José Alaniz

Front cover of The Compleat Moscow Calling(opens in new tab)Back cover of The Compleat Moscow Calling(opens in new tab)

front & back covers — click to enlarge

About the Book

A lost 1990s epic of expat life in Russia, The Compleat Moscow Calling follows innocent-abroad Pepe Pérez through a post-Soviet Moscow of colorful personalities, extreme contrasts, and a “mafiya” boss after his head. Worst of all: there’s no Mexican food.

Alaniz created “Moscow Calling” while working as a journalist in Russia; the strip ran in the English-language The Moscow Tribune after the fall of the Soviet Union. This collection gathers the strip, completes its storyline as a graphic novella, and adds further work from Alaniz’s Russian years, including the unfinished sequel “Cassie’s Turn,” the prose/graphic material “Moscow 93,” and the comics short story “Mariupol,” which turns toward the war in Ukraine.

What emerges is part expatriate chronicle, part cartoon grotesque, and part time capsule: a pre-Putin Russia rendered through the eye of a Mexican American cartoonist-journalist who was actually there.

Advance Praise

“Both wonderful and wonderfully demented. Also makes me strangely nostalgic.”Gary Shteyngart — author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan
“The Compleat Moscow Calling makes for quite the culture shock with its tale of a Mexican-American’s adventures in pre-Putin Russia. Remarkable, multilingual—a sequential arts achievement!”Hector Rodriguez — creator of El Peso Hero
“With a journalist’s eye and a cartoonist’s wit, he spins grand tales that interweave a talking bat and a motorcycle-riding Baba Yaga … an entertaining visual Molotov cocktail. Heed the call!”Javier Hernandez — creator of the El Muerto graphic novel series
“As scrappily independent as the newspaper in which they first appeared, the strips in José Alaniz’s The Compleat Moscow Calling echo with a visual language all their own: Nadsat by way of South Texas.”Álvaro Rodriguez — Machete

About José Alaniz

José Alaniz is a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Washington, where his fields include comics, Russian and post-Soviet culture, disability, cinema, and ecocriticism. His scholarly books include Komiks: Comic Art in Russia, Death, Disability and the Superhero, and Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia. He is also the cartoonist and writer of The Phantom Zone and Other Stories and other comics and prose.