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.
