Calling for Submissions for Volume 2

We’ve just posted our call for submissions to the second volume!

A Comic Book History of Greater Boston will be an anthology of short graphic nonfiction exploring the dramatic past of Boston and surrounding communities. This book can cover topics from before the first English settlers to the early 21st century, history as significant as the founding of the U.S.A. or as quirky as the invention of Marshmallow Fluff.

We welcome stories about famous New England heroes and about lesser-known people, incidents, and trends. We’re eager to highlight the lives of people who have been historically marginalized. Explore how historical memory is formed and how people revise their ideas of the past. We’re also partial to stories about towns or neighborhoods that contain a comics shop (since we’ll want to sell books there). Geographically, we see “greater Boston” as extending to Massachusetts’s northern and southern borders and as far west as the Quabbin Reservoir.

Please consult the list of historical topics covered in our first volume and don’t go over the same ground unless you’ve got a very new angle. That list may also give you ideas about what stories work great as comics and where to look for history that we haven’t covered.

All stories in A Comic Book History of Greater Boston must be grounded in accurate history. Fantasy elements (e.g., a ghostly narrator), composite characters (e.g., a typical couple marrying in the early 1700s), and cartoonish exaggeration are acceptable as long as those storytelling techniques serve the nonfiction history. Outright historical fiction, fantasy set in the past, alternative history, urban legends, and myths with no solid grounding aren’t right for this anthology.

To ensure all the stories are historically accurate, we’ll review your sources and perhaps ask you to consult some more. We’ll nitpick visual details like facial hair in the eighteenth century and point to other visual references. We want this collection to be accurate enough to be sold in national parks, enlightening enough to be used in schools. In sum, we want your stories to stand the test of history.

To read the rest of our call for submissions, with all the gory details of schedule and specs, click here.

The Publishing Team

J. L. Bell writes about the American Revolution in New England at Boston 1775 from his base in Newton. He was an assistant editor on the Colonial Comics: New England volumes and scripted short comics for those anthologies, Hellbound, Minimum Paige, The Greatest of All Time, Spellbound, Boundless, and other collections. In the late twentieth century, Bell edited nonfiction books.

Jordan Stillman is a publishing professional from Boston. She is co-director of the comics collective Robot Camp, a producer of the audio drama podcast The Ordinary Epic, a co-organizer of the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE), and managing editor of the first Boundless anthology of science comics. Stillman is a proud graduate of Emerson College.

Jonathan Hayes is a comics artist and writer working on personal projects ranging from children’s stories to dark fantasy. He was one of the editors of Spellbound 2, a Boston Comics Roundtable anthology of stories about modern magic.

Dan Mazur is a cartoonist, editor, teacher, and comics historian from Cambridge. He co-founded the Boston Comics Roundtable and the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE), and he manages the comics publisher Ninth Art Press. Mazur’s comics have appeared on their own and in many anthologies. He is coauthor with Alexander Danner of Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present.

Topics Covered in Volume 1

These are the historical topics covered in our first volume, A Comic Book History of Boston. They show the range of subjects our contributors tackled, and what topics are still out there to be explored in our second volume.

1600-1799

The Granary Burying Ground

New England’s “Dark Day”

The Sons of Liberty

Cowpaths of Waltham

Shays’ Rebellion

Boston’s First Duel

Pope’s Night

1800-1899

Black Sam the Pirate

Boston Athenaeum’s book bound in human skin

Heywood’s Brook in Concord

The Lost Pirate Treasure of “Dungeon Rock”

The Boston Slave Riot and the Trial of Anthony Burns

Edwin and John Wilkes Booth

Mark Twain Visiting Boston’s Literary Crowd

Old Ironsides

1900-1949

Moxie Soda

Charles Ponzi

Sacco and Vanzetti

The Old Howard Burlesque House

The Great Boston Molasses Flood

Harry “Bucky” Lew

Robert Goddard

1950-2009

Local Surfing History

ZOOM

James Brown’s concert on the night of the King assassination

The Busing Crisis

William Moulton Marston

The Boston Strangler

Boston Punk Rock

WBCN Breaks “Roxanne”

The Gardner Museum Heist

Student Activism on Immigration at Harvard

Celtic Rookie Dee Brown

Whitey Bulger, Fugitive

The Mooninite Bomb Scare

Town-Gown Relations in Cambridge

Are You a Contributor to Volume 1?

Were you one of the forty-two contributors to A Comic Book History of Boston, also known as Inbound 4? If so, we want to keep in touch with you!

Actually, we have kept in touch with a lot of you through the BCR, so we know all the great things you’ve accomplished since 2009. You’ve published books, graduated, started new jobs, moved to new towns, had kids, won Eisner Awards, and more!

The last couple of pages of Inbound 4 listed your email addresses and websites—as they were back then. We hope to update those pages with your current websites plus a short bio of each of you, including books, comic books, webcomics, or other art and history projects you’ve worked on. (And no emails.)

Please help us out by filling out the form on this page with your updated information.

Any questions? Please drop us a line at comicbookhistoryofboston@gmail.com. Thanks!

The Jernegan Solution, a True Story from Maine

The Jernegan Solution is, as its subtitle says, a true story of a get-rich-quick scheme in Maine at the end of the nineteenth century. It’s a true Gilded Age story, flecked with real gold. The author and artist is Dan Mazur, one of the editors of A Comic Book History of Boston.

Order The Jernegan Solution through Ninth Art Press.

Colonial Comics: New England

Some of the creators behind our Comic Book History of Boston volumes also contributed work to the Colonial Comics: New England series edited by Jason Rodriguez and published by Fulcrum Publishing.

The first volume covers the years 1620 to 1750 with stories of the British settlement of what they called New England, the Native peoples’ reactions to these newcomers, and the uneasy creation of a new society in the New World.

The second volume looks at the decades leading up to the Revolutionary War with more stories of discontent printers, displaced Native healers, enslaved men advocating for their liberty, counterfeiters, politicians, and the first shots heard ’round the world.

Look for both volumes in bookstores and online, or click on the cover images above to order direct.