Born and raised in Edinburg, TX, José Alaniz has worn a few hats over the years, including those of journalist, cartoonist and spinner of yarns. His work has appeared in The Bobcat News Journal, The Daily Texan, Analecta, The Moscow Tribune, The Berkeley Fiction Review, The Mesquite Review, The Stranger, the Seattle anthology Dune, AltCom: How To Survive a Dictatorship (2018), Tales From La Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology (2018), BorderX: A Crisis in Graphic Detail (2020) and SCARFFF. In 2020 he published his first comics collection, The Phantom Zone and Other Stories and in 2023 his second, The Compleat Moscow Calling (both from Amatl Comix).He is also a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema & Media Studies (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle. He has published three monographs: Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (University Press of Mississippi, 2010); Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (UPM, 2014); and Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia (Ohio State University Press, 2022). He has also co-edited two essay collections, Comics of the New Europe: Refl ections and Intersections (with Martha Kuhlman, Leuven University Press, 2020) and Uncanny Bodies: Disability and Superhero Comics (with Scott T. Smith, Penn State University Press, 2019). He formerly chaired the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF) and was a founding board member of the Comics Studies Society.