Next weekend, 24-25th October, is the MCM Expo (Movie-Comics-Media) at London's Excel Centre. You will find me in the Artists' Alley on table C14 - see the floor-plan here. This will be a new experience for me as the MCM appears to have its feet firmly planted in the worlds of manga, anime and television, so I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes for The Rainbow Orchid.

There have been some new and positive reviews for RO in the wake of BICS. First, let me point you to Shiny Shelf, and when you've had a read of that, you can click over to the Monkey On My Back blog, and listen to their podcast too, where they have more nice things to say. And talking of podcasts, the Geek Syndicate lads were also generous in their praise. I must also point out what's becoming something of a rather nice 'fan page' by Linda Wada, with a huge list of updates here - scroll down from the audio interview. Thank you to everyone for these, I really appreciate the support quite massively.

Work on volume two is going well and I am now about a month away from completion. I've got three pages left to pencil, fourteen to ink and colour, and then all the little extra bits that are required for the book. As much as I like volume one, the work in it is actually six years old (with the exception of the few re-drawn bits and two new pages) and I'm over-familiar with it. I'm much happier with the art in volume two (even though some of that is a few years old too) and the story goes up a notch, or maybe I should say goes in a notch, as the plot deepens and builds. Volume three is the big release (I hope).

Anyway, you'll be able to decide what you think of it for yourself in April 2010, when it's published. For now, here's a little pencil detail...