OK, folks. Fire up your Paypal accounts, clutch your credit cards and get ready for THE SHRINKER!!!
The second proof arrived during the week and it looks great. A couple of tweaks I made after seeing the first proof have printed correctly and I've had to make one correction to the second proof. But that means I'm going to start taking orders... and that means the early bird discount for people ordering ahead of the book going on sale through my Ebay store.
That'll be in a couple of weeks, as it will take that long for the printers to get the books to me. In the meantime, what I do is have books sent out directly from the printer, saving the cost of posting the books to me and then me posting them out to you. That saving I can pass on, and I usually trim a percentage off the cover price.
I'm hoping that this will get the book off to a good start. What most people forget is that I've already had to shell out the license fee and various other incidental costs weeks or months before I start seeing any orders come through and the first 40 or so copies sold are all going towards paying off what I've already spent—it's only once I've sold #50 that I might start to see a profit.
I must be mad!
Like the MYTEK THE MIGHTY books, this is a series I loved when I was a kid. I only caught the last few months of the story as I didn't start reading Valiant until 1969 and the strip ended in January 1970. At the time I wasn't aware that it was a reprint (from Buster) nor that the original artist was Mike Western, one of my favourites, who was drawing The Wild Wonders at that time. I saw more of the strip as I built up a collection of earlier issues, but they didn't arrive in chronological order, so it was years before I got a chance to read the whole thing.
I'd actually forgotten all about it until I was starting to scan what will be the next project from Bear Alley. As I was looking through my old Valiant's The Shrinker really stood out and it only took a couple of episodes and I was hooked. (Now you know why it takes so long for me to get books out!)
I'd mentioned The Shrinker in another book, the first volume of Mytek the Mighty, as being written by Tom Tully. I don't know where that information came from but probably Gil Page, who was working on Valiant in 1963 with Jack Le Grand and Sid Bicknell, who were also in charge of Buster where The Shrinker began appearing that year.
Since writing the introduction, it has come to light that David Motton was the writer... not only that, but he even has the scripts for the stories he wrote. I was able to talk David into writing a Foreword for the book, and we even reproduce a couple of pages of the opening script and a letter from Valiant's editorial office discussing the character of Capek.
And rather than writing an introduction myself, I asked Pete Western if he wanted to write something about his dad, Mike Western. Pete did and you can read it in the book.
You can order THE SHRINKER by following THIS LINK.
So... I'm writing introductory material to the next pair of books. Slowly but surely I'm getting there, although I think it's rambled off into areas it doesn't need to go at the moment, so a bit of trimming will help. A bit like the whole of our garden, but who has time for that when there's comics to read and write about. Talking of which, that's me done for this evening. Time to let everyone know about the new book!
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