This is the first collection of Gary Panter's Dal Tokyo comic strip. This book reproduces the first 63 strips--comprising all the strips that appeared in the L.A. Reader. Gary Panter began imagining Dal Tokyo, a future Mars that is terraformed by Texan and Japanese workers, as far back as 1972, appropriating a friend's idea about "cultural and temporal collision" (the "Dal" is short for Dallas).

The L.A. Reader published the first 63 strips in 1983. A few years later, the Japanese reggae magazine Riddim picked up the strip, and Panter continued the saga of Dal Tokyo in installments for over a decade.

Why Texan and Japanese? Panter says, "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."