Countdown: BICS-4 weeks

Here we are at BICS-4 weeks, more on this below, but first over to Crawford Coutts for the low down on what happened at the MILK launch and exhibition opening:

MILK Delivery

On Thursday night, MILK, the graphic novel and the exhibition, were launched at the Fine Art Library, located within Edinburgh’'s Central Library.

Around 50 people (significantly over capacity!) attended the hour-and-a-half long event – including a large number of the Edinburgh and Glasgow comic creators, numerous family members and former co-workers of Stref and some longer-distance folk who’d travelled up from London just for the launch.

Many other Insomnia creators came to see the event, reporters from the local Newspapers and even a Film Producer. Thankfully, we purchased more wine to cater for the large number of people! It was incredible to see such a brilliant turn-out and Stevie seemed delighted to see so many familiar faces that he’'d not seen for many years!

Piles of signed copies of the book rapidly disappeared and we received an endless stream of compliments about the art, production and print quality. I don’t know if this was the alcohol talking, but the enthusiasm and excitement about the book and exhibition was extraordinary!

We also had copies of Cages and Cancertown on sale at the event along with previews of other titles currently in development.

We received lots of interest from the Directors of the Libraries and the Edinburgh Art council in the hope we can work together more in the future, provisionally continuing the MILK exhibition to other libraries and looking at future Insomnia exhibitions and running similar workshops and events to the pilot scheme we’ve been running at the Essex Libraries.

After all the wine was consumed, many books were signed and sold, Winker Watson’s final outing original pages had found new homes, our first exhibition and book launch came to a close.

“To the Pub!”

A saying that is customary after these sorts of events, or so I'’m told.… We headed across the road to The Villager where some great networking took place, and lots more alcohol was disposed of.

Thank you very much to everyone who attended the launch, I am very grateful for your support and your interest in what we’re producing.

I'’m very grateful to the library staff who were extremely helpful with the organization of the exhibition, preparation and running of the launch. I look forward to working with you again in the future.

Also a big thanks to my better half, Audrey, who ran the “bar”, with the help of our good friend’s Corrie and Richard, who ran the signing table and till for the whole evening.

And finally, thank you to Victoria Wine for the loan of their wine glasses –the event would not have looked quite so sophisticated with plastic cups!

The MILK Exhibition continues until the end of September and the remaining copies of the limited edition signed copies of the book are now available from Amazon and all good book stores.

• Details of the Exhibition
• Details of the Book
  
• Buy MILK from amazon
  

BICS 2009 Update: Convention Special Offers

As usual we will be doing a number of convention specials on new and existing books.

This year the offers will be:

• 3 for £20 on all standard edition books
• Any special edition + one standard edition for £20

Standard Editions Con Prices

• Burke and Hare (RRP £12.99) Con Price £10
• Cancertown (RRP 14.99) Con Price £10
• Cages (RRP 10.99) Con Price £8
• Layer Zero Choices (RRP £9.99) Con Price £7

Special Editions Con Prices

• Buskers (RRP £14.99) Con Price £12
• MILK (RRP £19.99) Con Price £15

You can pre-order to collect on the day, or to be sent out by post (paid by cheque or paypal) so long as you order by 3rd October.

MILK and Buskers special editions are limited to 100 copies.

To reserve for pickup or to pre-order and for payment details you can email me at nichola[at]insomniapublications.com

Soon I'll be posting a list of our creators who will be at the show.

Burke and Hare Gallery Preview One

Looking forward as we all are to BICS 2009 we will be counting down to the big day by showing previews of the pin-up gallery from Burke and Hare as we gear up for the launch.

First out we have Stuart Beel, Stephen Daly and Nulsh:

By Stuart Beel
(and PJ Holden)

By Stephen Daly

By Nulsh

You can meet Martin and Will at the Insomnia stand at BICS 2009

New Artist Signing

Today (just in time for blog news update) we signed up an artist I have been wanting to work with for some time, and waiting for the right project to come along.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present Valia Kapadai.

Valia's work has already been in an Insomnia book, Layer Zero Choices, and she keeps up an incredible workrate with links to projects she is working on seeming to pop up every other day!

Valia will be working on Snow by Richard McAuliffe. We only had to see one page of sketches to know how perfect she would be for the story, nailing the look, mood and personality of the character right from the off.



More on this, and some previews very soon.

Valia and Richard will both be at BICS 2009, and we will have some limited stocks of Valia's mini comic on the stand as well.

Sharing the Love

Three loves to share this week:

• Michael Moreci has a prose noir short story Blurred Lines over on A Twist of Noir. You can also read more about the background on his blog.
  
  
• Adam R Grose has an ebook preview of Phoenix: A Warrior's Tale out for your reading pleasure. The book will be released through Clown Press on 13th of October. Described as an "an ‘onomatopoeia’ sequential graphic art novella , and illustrated by Tony Suleri it is something very different and well worth a look.
  
  
• The ever busy Geek Syndicate also have an ebook out, and this one includes sound and video! If you only know them from the podcast take a look and see what else they get up to, and find out more about the other parts of the expanding Geeky Syndicate Network.
  

And finally...

In our news snippets this week:

• You can catch me interviewed on Comic Racks this week. The Racks ladies Iz and Stace are both all kinds of awesome and made me really welcome.
  
  
• We are going to be at the London MCM Expo the 24th and 25th October, in the Comics Village section. More on this very soon.
  
  
• The Insomnia APA is taking shape nicely and is up at almost 70 pages now.
  

Phew - well, back to preparing for the events - we want to show you all a good time!