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About the Book
The Phantom Zone and Other Stories gathers roughly three decades of José Alaniz’s comics and prose, beginning with the title strip he created for the University of Texas at Austin’s Daily Texan in 1992–93. The strip drops its protagonist, Chip, into the “phantom zone” of post-college life: breakups, hangovers, existential drift, friendships, sex, work, and a talking cat named Seymour, all filtered through Alaniz’s dark four-panel timing.
The book’s second half moves through later work in changing styles and forms—superhero narrative, fotonovela, autobiographical and slice-of-life comics, border memories, family history, and observational pieces. The result is both a retrospective and a record of an artist refusing to settle into one visual language.
Published as Amatl Comix #3, the collection carries a foreword by Álvaro Rodriguez, co-screenwriter of Machete, situating Alaniz within the astonishing comics culture that came out of UT Austin in the early 1990s.
From Austin to the Border
Alaniz grew up in South Texas and began making comics long before becoming a scholar of comics himself. In The Phantom Zone and Other Stories, Austin-era Gen-X black comedy shares a book with later work on memory, place, the Rio Grande Valley, and the people and buildings that disappear from view unless somebody draws them back into the record.
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.