Dal Tokyo is a future Mars terraformed by Texan and Japanese workers, a cultural and temporal collision of Dallas (Dal) and Tokyo. On the choice of the two cities, Panter explains, “Because they are trapped in Texas, Texans are self-mythologizing. Because I was trapped in Texas at the time, I needed to believe that the broken tractor out back was a car of the future. Japanese, I’ll say, because of the exotic far-awayness of Japan from Texas, and because of the Japanese monster movies and woodblock prints that reached out to me in Texas. Japanese monster movies are part of the fabric of Texas.”

Conceptual descriptions, however, cannot justify the confounding visual and verbal richness of Dal Tokyo, as Panter’s famous “ratty style” collides and colludes with near-Joycean wordplay, veering from more or less intelligible jokes to dizzying non-sequiturs to surreal eruptions that can engulf the reader in scribbles. One doesn’t read Dal Tokyo; one is absorbed into it and spit out the other side.