The show was back in the Brunel Passenger Shed, which I think is a lovely venue for a comics show. Previous years in this location had got pretty stuffy, but the temperature was just right throughout the weekend. The other good thing was the amount of space - not only in the aisles, but also behind the table, meaning there was plenty of room to stand comfortably with the chair behind me, and to keep boxes out of the way under the table.

Ellie and Miranda went for a day out on Saturday, meeting an old Uni friend at Bristol Zoo, but for much of the afternoon I was kept company by John, an old friend I had originally met through my long-defunct Chaplin UK site - we'd been out of touch for over 10 years, so it was a real highlight of the weekend to catch up.

Saturday was a good day for sales with a non-stop busy patch from mid-morning to early afternoon. By the end of the day I only had 8 copies of The Rainbow Orchid vol 3 left, and I thought I wouldn't have enough for the Sunday. But Sunday was a very slow day, and while I sold a good few volume ones, and a couple or more full-sets, I still ended the day with two volume threes left. The advantage of the slow sales meant that I was able to have some decent chats with people, which made up for not being able to be sociable in the evenings.

My table was next to Joel Meadows, editor and publisher of the long-running Tripwire magazine. Joel was marvellous company throughout the weekend and I must point you in the direction of his Unbound appeal to help get the amazing 20th anniversary Tripwire special published. From what I've seen, it's going to be brilliant. It was also great to chat to Ben Le Foe who is involved in the London-based Comica, and is a fellow enthusiast and aficionado of European comics.

In addition, I had a long and interesting discussion with Daniel Clifford of Art Heroes. Besides being a top chap, Daniel is a definite force for good in comics and is doing some truly wonderful stuff - do go and check out his website and wares. I won't list all the nice people I met at Bristol (a robust list) but I would like to give special mention to Simon Gurr, whose terrific art is to be found in the new Scarifyers comic, making its debut at the show, and it's also always good to see Ben Dickson, who has conceived and written the very intriguing-looking Kestrels, being drawn by comics legend Mick McMahon.

This year's Bristol Expo has come in for a bit of criticism, some of it understandable, but some of it, I think, a little unjustified (eg. convention helpers expected to be of a standard able to deal with any brawls that might kick-off!). I was pretty relaxed about the show as it was my first one for over a year, my first with The Rainbow Orchid vol 3, and I was happy to have some time to have good long chats with people. I'm also really lucky in that some of my expenses are offset by my publisher (I do have to buy all my own book stock, though). Still, from a purely financial point of view, I made enough to cover my table costs and one meal for me and my family. That still leaves travel, hotel for two nights, other meals, and time away from work when I'd otherwise be earning at the drawing board. I would imagine it's pretty rare that someone comes out of all that with a profit to show. It's not all about money of course; meeting readers and fellow comic creators is very important, and there is value in people seeing me and my book even if they don't buy it.

There were a couple of minor quibbles I had, but that would be the same with any show, and they're certainly nothing worth making a fuss over. Overall I had fun, got some time out of the house, got my books to some new readers, and met lots of nice people within a very pleasant atmosphere.

There is a bigger problem, and in a way it's kind of a nice problem - there are now a lot of comic shows throughout the year stretching what is quite a small (though growing) scene. It used to be that UKCAC or Bristol was the big annual comics event, but now you can take your pick, often from several in a month. On the same day as Bristol there was the inaugural CamCon in Cambridge, and the buzz word at Bristol seemed to be Kapow! - the big London show taking place this weekend. Quite a number of comics people I usually see eschewed Bristol in favour of Kapow!. I had been invited to take a table at Kapow! but decided against it - tables at Bristol were £78 and £140 for the London show, not to mention all the hassle of getting stock into the city and then paying for accommodation too. Still, it does seem like it will be a very well attended event and I would certainly consider it next year.

It'll be interesting to see how things develop over the coming couple of years. It'd be nice to see comics move out of its niche market and opening up to a more general audience (I'm lucky to have a book that seems to do equally well at literary festivals or comic shows), especially to children - a noticeable minority at comic events. Steps are being made in the right direction, and it may be a case of a flowering comics industry adjusting and finding its feet as it starts to venture into some of that mainstream territory. Let's hope so.

"... I think it's brilliant! I particularly like that your illustrations and their style have grown into your own as the series has progressed - they are no longer Jacobs-like or Herge-like, but truly your own. I also love the fact that the character's voices are now fully developed, and your author's voice can be clearly heard as well. It was a treat to see the series just get better and better with each volume!" - MV

"I have to admit I was psychologically prepared for a let-down after the first two wonderful volumes - I wasn't sure you'd tie up all those intriguing plot strands. But you did - a really satisfying read, and one that I can and will re-read. One of my favourite comics from the last 5 years (and I read a lot of comics)." - EJ

A review has appeared here and there as well ...

"Rainbow Orchid has always had a great approach to recreating Saturday morning cinema serials. There's dynamic action, a complex amount of characters and interactions, but a strong focus as ever on lighthearted, old-fashioned entertainment ... you should certainly consider the Rainbow Orchid series amusing, sincere and ultimately admirable entertainment." - We Love This Book

"... Ewing designs his plot and his artwork very much as Herge did, but here is no pastiche, no arch mimicry, nor self-aware updating. He has the same global reach in his narrative, a similar love of detail - if anything his panels are more detailed than the Belgian's - and a kindred sense of humour ... three detailed yet snappy, fun yet serious, modern yet timeless sections to buy." - The Book Bag

It was also one of Lovereading 4 Kids' Books of the Month for April 2012.

Volume 3 has spent the majority of the last month in Amazon's Top 100 Children's Graphic Novels (a chart that consists mostly of imports, reprints, adaptations and picture books), and has even troubled the tougher general Graphic Novels Top 100 category on a number of occasions.

There have been a couple of interviews recently, too. Matthew Murray interviewed me for The Beat, one of the US's main comic-news blogs, and Peter Whitehead interviewed me for the Waterstones booksellers' SF and comics newsletter, Don't Panic (not available online).

As you know, I wasn't able to make DemonCon 3 so that means the Bristol Comic Expo will be my first show of the year - come and see me there on the 12-13th May (two weekends away!). I'll also be at Stripdagen in Haarlem, Holland, on June 1st or 2nd (tbc) for the release of De Regenboog Orchidee 3. And check this out - my Dutch publisher, Silvester Strips, are issuing all three volumes in a lovely boxed set ...

More locally, I will be at The Bookshop on the High Street in East Grinstead, West Sussex, on Sat 23 June, signing, chatting about comics, and showing some of my original artwork.

And talking of local - if you're not going to Bristol and want something excellent and comics-related for children, get along to StoryFest in Hartfield on Sun 13th May where my comics chum, Neill Cameron (Pirates of Pangea, Mo-Bot High), is doing one of his fabulous comic workshops. Tickets available here as part of the brand new Hartfield Children's Book Festival.

I must also mention that The Scarifyers (the audio mystery-adventure series from Cosmic Hobo that I've been doing the covers for) is being published as a comic! I believe the first issue will be available at Bristol. It's written by series creator and writer Simon Barnard, and illustrated by the excellent Simon Gurr. The latest audio adventure, The Horror of Loch Ness, is out in June.

My third apology goes to everyone who is awaiting an email response from me. I'm way behind on my emails and can currently only deal with urgent work-related ones.

I'll catch up at some point - I promise!

Buy it from your local book shop, buy it from your local comic shop, get it online from Egmont, Forbidden Planet, or Amazon, or the Book Depository. Enjoy ...

William Pickle as drawn in 1997 and 2009

He was originally called William Buckle, but that only lasted as long as the first rough plot outline. As with Lily Lawrence, I wrote and drew an origin story for Pickle, this one seeing print in the Accent UK anthology, Twelve, in May 2005. For this I had to base a story on one of the twelve tasks of Heracles, and I was given the ninth task - the Girdle of Hippolyte. This became 'The Girdle of Polly Hipple', a story that saw Pickle accompany his mentor, Seth Surrey (whose name was taken from Eurystheus), on a job to get a photograph of the famous Eye of Horus, an Egyptian artefact to be used as the centre-piece of an exclusive fashion show. It was here that Pickle learned the power of nudging the news along if it didn't quite live up to expectations, a realisation that caused the corner of his mouth to take on an involuntary and permanent crooked scheming sneer.

Even so, Pickle isn't really bad. He's impatient for sensation but lives to be able to report a good story and write it up for his readers.

Incidentally, some of my favourite bits of writing in The Rainbow Orchid have featured William Pickle ... when Sir Alfred bamboozles him with botanical terms and his awkward fight with Newton, both in volume 1, and his attempted escape from the clutches of Urkaz Grope in volume 3.

Having changed the appearance of Sir Alfred's home I had to change every panel in which its exterior appeard. Here's one from a bit later in the story - the early version is pretty bad, and looks even more of a fake location than the early first panel. What an improvement a bit of architecture and street life can make! (Okay, plus a gap of 6 years and a slight improvement in my drawing ability).

I have been asked before if I use Google Sketch-Up for buildings - no, definitely not! (I think you can tell that, actually, otherwise they'd probably be a lot more ambitious!) A ruler, a pencil, two or three vanishing points and a bit of patience (maybe a little impatience every now and then, too), and though it may take longer, I like the feeling that it's all my own work - warts and all. The photograph below shows a page I was working on last year with three sheets of paper attached, each holding a vansihing point, and the finished panel.

I've been wanting to preview bits of The Rainbow Orchid volume 3 but too many extracts contain spoilers. Instead, here's a grid of bits of panels - enough, I hope, to intrigue, but without giving anything away!

Visit this wonderful tumblr blog of his work.

So, what do we know about Lily? She is the daughter of Lord Reginald Tybalt Stone Pritchard Lawrence and Ann Blyth McKay (deceased) and had a brother, Peter Stone Scott Lawrence, who was killed on the Western Front in 1916. She ran away from home to become a stage actress and then ran away from that, to America, where she eventually became a film star at United Players.

Visually Lily took a little while to come through. At first she was too tom-boyish, though I didn't want her to be too 'girly' either. The inspiration for clinching her look came when I saw a photograph of a young Coco Chanel, though she changed more from that point on. Lily has the most complicated hair style and I still sometimes struggle to get it right!

Below is an early watercoloured drawing of Lily, from 1997, and one of the scrapbook pieces I came up with for volume 1 in 2009, Lily on the cover of Picture Show magazine.

When I mention I enjoy researching my family history a common reaction is surprise that someone so young (ahem) should be interested in a hobby that is generally regarded as the preserve of the retired. I love history, and I love doing research, but the catalyst in this case was a postcard album that my mum inherited from her mother when she died. It had belonged to my great-grandmother, and looking through it mum and I agreed that it might be fun to research some of the people the cards were written to, many of them long-forgotten and now unknown family members. Sadly, my mum died not long after, and the postcard album ended up with me permanently.

A few years later I decided to begin researching my family history and started gathering information from various relatives. At that time a lot of research still had be done by going to the Family Records Centre in Islington (for birth, marriage and death records and census returns) and the National Archives at Kew (most commonly for military service papers). I spent a lot of time with index cards, microfiche readers and gazettes, searching through lists and taking notes. Things are so much easier now! All those indexes and, indeed, many of the original records, are available and searchable online - what a difference. It's great that it's easier, and you can do so much more with database searches, but I must admit the sense of discovery is somewhat lessened when you're not 'out in the field', and you miss sights such as the American lady I saw at the FRC once, who had come to England especially to search the 19th century census returns, and sat at the microfilm reader in full Victorian dress to get into the part.

My gg-grandfather, Andrew Phillip (1843-1931), a stone mason, and his family in about 1888.

Discovering and learning about my family history has been a revelation. There are some who just can't understand the fascination, but I find it odd that many people just about know who their grandparents were but nothing beyond that. Knowing the story of how I came to be here, both genetically and geographically, having a 'history-map' of the people and movements that combined to put me, my brother and my parents on the earth, and knowing not just the depth of my background, but the width as well (6th cousins!). It's a big picture that I'm glad to be aware of and I've been able to find the truth behind some well-worn family stories as well as learning a lot about life in the past in general

In my family I've discovered tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors, nurses, firemen, artists, Gypsies, actresses, musicians, thieves, murderers, paupers, servants to publicans and peers, teachers, footballers, chimney sweeps, farmers, labourers, coal miners, clerks, shopkeepers, makers of cities, roads, ships, shoes, hats and fancy boxes, drivers of trains, trams, taxis and horse-drawn carts, preachers, vicars and, I'm sorry to say, one less than admirable Catholic Priest (very distantly related, I stress!).

One resource that has opened up relatively recently are newspaper archives. With this you can delve into the actual detail of life, beyond names, dates and occupations. Unfortunately, it's usually the bad news that gets reported - deaths and criminal activity especially, but they do, it has to be said, make for some of the most fascinating stories.

My g-grandmother Minnie Alice Lees (1887-1943, centre - it was her postcard album that started all this off) at Blackpool with her best friend Millie Norman and Millie's sister, c.1912.

This Christmas I learned what had happened to a gggg-uncle, Robert Ewing, who had previously disappeared from the records as a 10-year old flax winder in Dysart. It turns out he went on to become the captain of his own ship and ended up being thrown into a stormy ocean and drowning off the coast of Syria when he was 32. Another one to add the the tragic Ewing family deaths.

The wife of another gggg-uncle, Henry Higson, I knew had died at age 37, but I had no idea how until a fairly lurid newspaper article revealed that she cut her own throat in front of her children at breakfast one morning - very shocking stuff. The fact that her brother was in an insane asylum was enough, it seems, to explain her tragic actions at the inquest. Knowing this sad story has made me want to now find out what became of the three daughters who witnessed it and were 12, 10 and 4 years old at the time.

The most 'sensational' story was the 1903 murder of a policeman committed by three Gypsy brothers who each received fifteen years in prison. One of them came out to fight in World War One and was killed at the Somme.

My ggg-uncle Donald Cameron (far left, 1852-1926), a piper with the 72nd Highlanders with whom he marched from Kabul to Kandahar in 1880.

My most exciting find is far less sensational and more personal - and would no doubt bore you to death if I explained it in any detail! Since 2000, when I started, I've been trying to break through a wall to discover who the parents were of my ggg-grandmother, Eliza Sherriff. I have finally found the answer. It's been a long and torturous route to make the discovery - but that's what makes it so rewarding; finding the clues, one here one year, one there another year, until a door is finally unlocked and a whole pile of new questions and puzzles is revealed. It's hugely enjoyable.

This link will show you the family history category blog entries on this blog, and this link will take you to my little family history website.

Last week Murray and I completed our podcast discussions for those ten adventure films I blogged about earlier in the year and you can listen to our chat about Ray Harryhausen's The Golden Voyage of Sinbad at the Adventure Film Podcast blog. We do intend to record an eleventh podcast, an overview of film adventure and to see if any interesting conclusions can be drawn from the films we discussed. Your thoughts are most welcome too!

I wanted to review a small pile of excellent small press titles received over the past couple of months, but have run out of time. Instead, let me point you towards them - all top quality and well worth adding to your reading list: wonderful artwork and superhero drama with Martin Eden's Spandex; stylistic and metropolitan comics antholgy from David O'Connell and friends with Ink + Paper; worthy and marvellous successor to Whores of Mensa, Strumpet; north-east heroics and intrigue with Daniel Clifford and Gary Bainbridge's Sugar Glider. And if you want some excellent comic reading throughout 2012, and you haven't done so already, do yourself a big favour and go and subscribe to The Phoenix - it is something truly special.

Lastly, don't forget that The Rainbow Orchid volume 3, the concluding episode, will be published at the beginning of April 2012 - precisely ten years since it was first serialised in BAM! (issue 22, April 2002). The Dutch edition, De Regenboog Orchidee, will be published in May. In the meantime, here's the completed cover for you.

Have a lovely Christmas!