After last week's announcement that the next book from Bear Alley will be THE SHRINKER I have very little news. The proof arrived, looked good, I made a couple of minor changes and I'll be ordering a second proof. After that I'll be taking the usual "early bird" orders ahead of official publication with a bit of a discount, and then we'll have the book on sale as usual.
For your delectation and delight (I hope), below are the opening few pages. The story barrels along at a terrific pace, and Mike Western seems to have had a terrific amount of fun using the perspective of the inch-high RAF pilots to give the strip a unique viewpoint. I'll confess here that I'd pretty much forgotten about he strip until earlier this year when I was re-reading another strip in Valiant and spotted the opening pages of 'The Shrinker'.
'The Shrinker' had already started when I began buying Valiant, which was mid-1969, Carlos Cruz had already taken over the artwork, so it was only years later, as I built up a collection of Valiant's earlier years, that I saw the first two tales of Capek and the miniaturized Squadron Leader Flint and Sergeant Slake and mostly out of order thanks to the somewhat random nature of collecting weekly comics. I still had gaps up to about four years ago.
By the time our miniaturized heroes were attacked by the cat, I was gripped.
We've reached the mid-point of the year, so here's the Top 10 bestsellers from Bear Alley Books to the end of June:
1 Action: The Sevenpenny Nightmare
2 Mytek the Mighty volume 4
3 Mytek the Mighty volume 3
4= Mytek the Mighty volume 1
4= Air Ace Picture Library Companion
6= Mytek the Mighty volume 2
6= Countdown to TV Action
8 Lion King of Picture Story Papers
9 Ranger: The National Boys' Magazine
10 Rocket: The First Space-Age Weekly
Not surprising that the most recent books are selling the best, but also nice to see that the older books are still in that "long tail" of sales, and Lion and Countdown are still finding an audience. So that audience at even the lower end of the Top 10 you can almost count on the fingers of your hands, but the plan for Bear Alley was always to have books that would contribute a small amount every year that would add up to a reasonable wage when multiplied by the 100 books I had under my belt.
(Yes, it has gone a little bit wrong... I've published 50 books (if you count the volumes of Mytek individually), which is only half my target. I'm going as fast as I can....)
I've mentioned that I've been on a bit of a book-buying spree recently, so to end this week we have some random scans... and the usual advice: keep hydrated and wear a hat, folks, because the hot weather hasn't gone away.
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