Where to Find the Essex County Wax Museum

As a Halloween treat I offer an online pointer to “The Essex County Literary Wax Museum & Menagerie,” a four-page comics story scripted by me and brought to life by Alex Cormack, with an editing assist from Jesse Lonergan.

This story appears in Minimum Paige, a comics anthology published by the Harvard Book Store a couple of years back. It’s also collected in Alex’s new art book.

A Peek Inside Minimum Paige

At Robot 6, local comics super-journalist Brigid Alverson interviewed Ryan Mita about the Minimum Paige comics anthology that he edited for the Harvard Book Store. It’s become the store’s top seller—no doubt because it’s not available anywhere else but the store’s print-on-demand book-making machine.

Ryan was, I think, the first person I met when I attended the Boston Comics Roundtable. Most folks there were interested in writing comics or drawing comics or both. Ryan said he was interested in marketing comics. And by assembling this anthology, he’s provided a platform for dozens of creators.

More than one hundred submissions came in, and among Ryan’s remarks in the interview is:

I think the biggest surprise was how professional all the artists were. Not a single submission came in after deadline. Not one. I remember having visions of artists calling at 5:01 asking for extensions, but it was silent, so I played with fonts instead.

Giving credit where it’s due, I must report that artist Alex Cormack handled the submission of our story, “Essex County Literary Wax Museum & Menagerie,” which leads off the collection. I might well have been on the phone at 5:01.

An Honor Just to Be Nominated

It turns out that the Harvard Book Store editors of the Minimum Paige comics anthology I wrote about yesterday awarded prizes to their favorite entries.

And it turns out Alex Cormack and I won second prize for our story, “Essex County Literary Wax Museum & Menagerie.” That story also opens the collection on a “literary” note.

The first-prize winner was writer-artist Robert Sergel for a two-page story called “Control.”

Third prize went to Lindsay Moore and Laurel Leake for “Amazons vs. Valkyries,” a wordless comic about sports and mythology which you can also read here.

And speaking of Amazons, I came away from the book’s launch party with a Wonder Woman figurine. (There were door prizes.) Alas, I didn’t get to see the Paige M. Gutenberg print-on-demand machine actually make a copy of the book.

Working for Minimum Paige

Tomorrow the Harvard Book Store celebrates the publication of Minimum Paige, its first anthology of comics from around Massachusetts and the country.

Four of those pages are a horror story that I scripted and Alex Cormack drew and lettered, called “The Essex County Literary Wax Museum & Menagerie.”

Alex is also preparing that short story as a mini-comic to sell at the Massachusetts Independent Comics Exposition this weekend. He’s designing a cover, making copies, stapling—this is called “independent comics publishing.” (I offered to pay half the costs and haven’t done any of the physical work. This is called “the traditional publishing model” from the publisher’s perspective.)