Axel Alonso

Alonso's father is from Mexico, and his mother is from England. A native of San Francisco, Alonso earned a bachelor's degree in sociology and politics from University of California, Santa Cruz and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.

Alonso began his career as a journalist for New York's Daily News. He also worked as a magazine editor before he entered the comic book industry. One day, he saw an ad in The New York Times for DC Comics editors and thought it would be fun to interview, never thinking he would actually be offered a job, though he ended up being hired by the publisher.

Alonso's first published work for DC Comics was Doom Patrol #80 and Animal Man #73, which were published in July 1994, the latter of which was part of the company's Vertigo line, which publishes books in genres such as horror and fantasy aimed at mature readers. Other Vertigo titles he edited until 1999 included Garth Ennis' Preacher, Black Orchid, Kid Eternity, Hellblazer, Unknown Soldier, 100 Bullets and Human Target.

In late September 2000 Alonso went to work at DC's main competition, Marvel Comics, as Senior Editor, where he worked on Spider-Man books such as The Amazing Spider-Man and Peter Parker: Spider-Man. His first published work as editor was The Amazing Spider-Man trade paperback that collected issues #30 - 32 of that title, and was published in 2001.

Alonso spent more than a decade as an editor at Marvel, working on some of its most notable characters. In 2001, he began editing The Amazing Spider-Man. He would continue on the title during J. Michael Straczynski's critically acclaimed run on the title, which began in 2003. It was also in 2001 that Alonso helped to create the a Marvel MAX line for mature readers.

In 2002, Alonso, then a senior editor, had lured Frank Cho to Marvel on the basis of Cho's comic strip series Liberty Meadows. Alonso approached Cho to revamp the third-string character Shanna the She-Devil, a scantily clad jungle girl whom Cho recast in a seven-issue, 2005 miniseries as an Amazonian naïf, the product of a Nazi experiment with the power to kill dinosaurs with her bare hands but an unpredictable lack of morality.

Alonso is also credited with bringing crime writers to work on Marvel titles, such as Duane Swierczynski and Victor Gischler.

Alonso edited stories featuring the Western character Rawhide Kid, the first of which was the 2003 biweekly Marvel Max miniseries Rawhide: Slap Leather by Ron Zimmerman and John Severin, which drew controversy for its depiction of the titular character as a homosexual, albeit through the use of innuendo in the book's design and dialogue. The series was labeled with a "Parental Advisory Explicit Content" warning on the cover. Alonso stated of the miniseries, "We thought it would be interesting to play with the genre. Enigmatic cowboy rides into dusty little desert town victimized by desperadoes, saves the day, wins everyone's heart, then rides off into the sunset, looking better than any cowboy has a right to." Alonso would later edit the 2010 miniseries Rawhide Kid: The Sensational Seven by Zimmerman and Howard Chaykin.