But we won't dwell on that! The evening was something of a blur, but a pretty fantastic blur if my hazy memory is anything to go by. It took place at the Gallery on the third floor of Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road, London, where a marvellous job had been done by Egmont in making up some stunning A1 boards of various bits of Rainbow Orchid artwork and sketches, which all went to give as good an impression of the book as was possible.
I got there a little early to be interviewed by Alex Fitch for his Panel Borders show for Resonance FM, and by the time we'd finished the gallery was starting to fill up with friends, colleagues and other invited guests, not to mention a strong showing from both Egmont, my publisher, and Blake Friedmann, my agents.
I'm going to avoid listing everyone who came, because a) there were quite a lot of people, and b) I'd hate to miss anyone out. But I must say how enormously grateful I am to everyone who showed up, especially those who travelled from a fair distance outside of London - I was genuinely flabbergasted and touched by the support on show and that is my main memory of the evening.
Tim Jones gave a very flattering speech about me being at Egmont and I'm afraid I gave a fairly vanilla list of thanks at which I was unable to convey my true appreciation of everything everyone has done to help get me this far with the book. I'm sure I left out a few people, but one person I'm absolutely sure I didn't mention, and who certainly deserves the most praise, is my wife Elyssa. Believe me, especially recently, if it wasn't for her there probably wouldn't be a Rainbow Orchid to be published - and that goes for volume two especially.
You can see a very nice gallery of photographs of the evening over on Facebook, and there are a handful of people who managed to be far more industrious than I and get their reports up the following day, including Alex Milway, Murray Ewing, Sarah McIntyre, John Freeman, Joel Meadows and Julian Friedmann.
I believe my Panel Borders interview will be available as a podcast next week some time, and you can also see a short clip of me being interviewed by Iyare of the Fantastic Realms vidcast on the evening.
While I'm writing, a couple more links... some nice Rainbow Orchid reviews at the Financial Times, Comics Bulletin and Down the Tubes, and a short video version of Linda Wada's interview with me from April.
And not content with one book launch, I am having another on Friday 21st August at The Bookshop in East Grinstead - see here for details. Anyone is welcome to come along. And in the mean time, I'll see you at Caption in Oxford tomorrow!