Sunday Speaker Series: The Compleat Moscow Calling

The Museum of South Texas History will host the online Sunday Speaker Series presentation, “The Compleat Moscow Calling,” featuring author José Alaníz on Facebook Live.

Alaníz’s “Moscow Calling” is the first ongoing American comic strip in Russia, appearing in the English-language newspaper The Moscow Tribune not long after the Berlin Wall fell. The comic strip is a 1990s epic of expat life in Russia. Innocent abroad Pepe Pérez finds himself in a vibrant post-Soviet Moscow of colorful personalities, extreme contrasts and a mafiya boss after his head. Worst of all, there’s no Mexican food. “The Compleat Moscow Calling” gathers and concludes the strip along with additional material, including the unfinished sequel “Cassie’s Turn” and the novella “Moscow ‘93.” Copies of the comic books can be purchased at the Museum Store.

Edinburg native Alaniz is a professor in the department of Slavic languages and literatures and the department of comparative literature (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle. He has published two comics/prose collections: “The Phantom Zone & Other Stories” (Amatl Comix, 2020) and “The Compleat Moscow Calling” (Amatl, 2023). His work has also appeared in The Daily Texan, The Moscow Tribune, “Tales From La Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology” (2018), BorderX: A Crisis in Graphic Detail (2020) and others. Currently, he produces a monthly comic strip, “We Live Here,” for Key Peninsula News. He and his wife live with many animals in rural Washington state.

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.