Texas Border Business
EDINBURG, Texas — José Alaniz, an Edinburg native, has created a comic collection that highlights Rio Grande Valley history. For the first time, Alaniz will present his comic collection during the Sunday Speaker Series Online presentation titled “The Phantom Zone and Other Stories: An Author’s Talk” at 2 p.m. Aug. 23 on Facebook Live. This presentation will be hosted by the Museum of South Texas History.
Alaniz, a comics scholar and artist, will discuss his first comics collection, made up of strips first published in the 1990s in The Daily Texan, the student newspaper at the University of Texas at Austin,and more recent material.
Alaniz, professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Comparative Literature (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle, has published two books, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (2010) and Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (2014), both from the University Press of Mississippi. Long before that, though, he was drawing comics. His work has appeared in The Bobcat News Journal, The Daily Texan, The Moscow Tribune, The Stranger, Seattle Weekly, the Seattle anthology Dune, AltCom: How To Survive a Dictatorship (2018), Tales From La Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology and BorderX: A Crisis in Graphic Detail.
The Phantom Zone and Other Stories (Amatl Comix, 2020) is his first comics collection. He was born and raised in Edinburg, Texas.
The presentation will be streamed at facebook.com/MOSTHistory/live. Guests are encouraged to interact with the presenter by posting questions and comments on the live chat. The video will also be recorded and posted for public access on the Museum’s website at www.mosthistory.org.
This program is made possible by the generous support from the Carmen C. Guerra Endowment. Mrs. Guerra was committed to educational causes in the Rio Grande Valley. This named endowment was created by her family to honor her memory and to continue providing educational opportunities for the community.
