Jet, one of the characters from Codename Stasis

On a sweltering El Cajon evening this past summer, I found myself inside Testo Pepesto, the Main Street Italian restaurant. As I waited for the hostess, I inspected a wall next to the entrance that was generously layered in flyers and posters. I was looking for concerts, mostly, but a different sort of flyer caught my eye. “Codename Stasis,” it read. “San Diego-based urban fantasy via zine, printed locally, distributed by foot and public transit!” The flyer had those little tearable pieces at the bottom, like an ad for a tutor or a dog walker might have.

I thought it was a neat idea to offer a paper-based publication like that, and the summary made this one feel particularly cozy, specific to San Diego, and personal: “distributed by foot and public transit.” I tore a piece off of the flyer and soon got in touch with the author. She uses the nom de plume A.E. Amor. She is a local substitute teacher, a Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast, and the wife of a long-haul truck driver, who is also, at times, conceptually involved in the project. His pseudonym is A.C. Dnor. She sometimes accompanies him on trips, spreading the current issue of her zine farther and wider than usual.

The origin of the project? “I’ve seen the girl with the white hair since I was 17, so for over two decades,” she says. She’s referring to one of her main characters, Soleil. The girl would show up in Amor’s imagination and in her artwork — Amor is also the zine’s illustrator. Amor would draw her repeatedly, “obsessively.” One day while riding a San Diego bus in 2008, she says, “I saw her falling from the sky — in my head.” A nugget of a plot began to develop around the character. Later, at SDSU in 2019, when she was a student there, she began to produce more notes and narrative material, and was helpfully pushed by her teachers to develop her ideas. One SDSU class in particular provided her with an introduction to bookmaking, and also the world of zines, of which the university’s Love Library has a sizable collection. The slitted and folded single-sheet form that Codename comes in derives from that class. But all this was prelude to Codename as it is exists now. The first issue didn’t come out until June of last year.

I ask Amor and Dnor how they might summarize the story. He gives me a fairly abstract account of the shape of the story, saying that it’s about a world in which “a universal balance has gotten off track,” with some characters working to fix that, and others working to further the problem. Amor says, alternatively, “It’s a story about burritos, magical girls, and the apocalypse.” She also notes that it takes place in a world in which magic has gone dormant from people ignoring it, but which returns, and returns here in San Diego.