SLG Publishing is debuting a new comic series called Winchester in October. The series is “about Sarah Winchester, heiress of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company fortune and architect of one of the oddest houses in the United States. Part historical fiction, part ghost story, Winchester will take the few facts known about the very private Sarah Winchester and try to provide a context for her building of the giant Winchester Mansion which is now an internationally known landmark and historic attraction.”
After the death of her husband in 1881, Sarah Winchester took her twenty-million dollar fortune to San Jose, California, and bought an eight room Victorian style farmhouse which she immediately began renovating and adding on to. Construction on the house continued for 38 years, nonstop, until the day she died. The popular belief was that Sarah Winchester built the house to appease the spirits of people killed by the Winchester Rifle.
Explaining why he chose this topic, SLG Publisher and Winchester writer Dan Vado said, “The place has always fascinated me. I’ve lived around the corner from this place my entire life and it’s like the house has been begging me to write about it. It would be easy to write Mrs. Winchester off as crazy, and to be honest that’s the direction we were taking with the comic series. But then I thought about the tragedies in her life and the toll they must have taken on her, so I decided to make the Sarah Winchester in our series a more sympathetic figure.” Vado also points to the number of patents Sarah Winchester held and the almost futuristic labor saving elements designed into the house as proof that, while odd, Sarah Winchester was not crazy or stupid. “The house was self-sufficient, one might call it green, well before there was even a name for it.”
Making Winchester the heroine required the invention of a new villain, and Vado decided on the ghost of Harry Houdini. Houdini had once visited the Winchester Mansion after the death of its owner and held a seance there. Later, Houdini would spend his life debunking spiritualism and the supernatural. “I couldn’t resist the irony of making Houdini a ghost since he so clearly did not believe in them,” said Vado.
The Winchester Mansion in the series is not a tourist attraction but an abandoned mansion that locals all know to stay away from, difficult given it’s location right near a freeway and major shopping mall. A series of ghostly events are set in motion when a police detective gains access to the grounds to investigate a missing persons case. As the investigation unfolds bits and pieces of the Sarah Winchester story are revealed and we meet several famous spirits who have taken up residence in the old manse.
Winchester #1 is illustrated by Drew Rausch, and will ship in October 2009. And to celebrate the arrival of the new series, SLG Publishing will host a release party at which the original art from the series will be on display. The party/showing will be 2 October at SLG’s own gallery, located at it’s offices at 577 S. Market Street, San Jose, California 95113. For more information, see this page.