After months of writing and drawing, planning, scheming, and fretting, Saturday the 3rd of October was finally upon us; signifying the grand launch of the Jack in in the Box graphic novel at the British/ Birmingham International Comics Show 2009.

On the build up to the show, we'd promised our online followers much live Tweeting and Facebookery to give a blow-by-blow account of book sales, cosplayer encounters, and celebrity spotting throughout the event. Unfortunately we'd missed the information on the BICS website where it explained that we had to book our wireless internet in advance. This misunderstanding turned out to be the only (extremely minor) inconvenience in an otherwise brilliant weekend for C2D4 Comics.

We found our spot and quickly set up our stand. Well, the first hour was deathly slow on that Saturday morning, causing Martin and I to have our customary panic attack that all our efforts were going to amount to nought. But then we had our first book sale. Then another. Then some sets of badges. Our competition began to get noticed, with people attempting to guess the weight of the black box (presumably filled with debris from the Roswell crash) in order to win a signed/ numbered print of the artwork we had printed in the BICS official programme. We have our 3 winners, and their prizes will be on their way soon.

Sales continued solidly throughout the day, including sales of the graphic novel, single issues (of Chickenheads and Crowman), and sets of 5 badges. The healthy convention sales of the novel were in addition to several sales made the day before as part of our pre-order offer. People also grazed from our free sweeties stash, sometimes resorting to a game of cat-and-mouse skullduggery, sneaking by as many times as they could, and grabbing big handfuls. But they're the ones who'll end up suffering in a dentist's chair...not us!

The second day brought more good fortune, with novel and badge sales continuing strongly. We had numerous really nice comments about our branding and display, with one person even saying that we had the best coordinated stand of the whole show....nice. It seems our constant spamming of the entire interwebs worked wonders for the event, as lots of people who bought the book had been following the countdown and e-mail campaign, genuinely enjoying the updates as they arrived in their inbox.

Our t-shirts were also a big draw, and we may have to add those to our merchandising at some point. We took time to part with some of our money on other people's wares. Martin buying some Judge Dredd collected volumes from 2000ad's stand, and me buying a beautiful Moebius art book from Gosh, and the Razor Jack graphic novel by John Higgins from his stand. John drew me a blinding sketch of Razor Jack as well, which I'll get framed soon. We had a great chat about the labour of love that creating and publishing can be, and I told him all about Alameda...he seemed very interested in the concept! He's a really nice guy. Insomnia were also there, and we took it in turns to drop by each other's stands. I bought a copy of their amazing title Cancer Town, and had it autographed by all involved.

We sold our last novel about 3pm Sunday, to a podcaster who reviews comics, so we'll post links to that review when it comes out. Then at 4pm we realised the event had pretty much run its course for everyone, and headed back to Essex, feeling pretty damned pleased with ourselves. Now we're looking forward to Comica on November 8th, and the Bristol show in May 2010.

Finally, we thought we'd let you know that the novel is available to buy from this website with the added incentive of a JITB character sketch with each purchase. Plus it is also available from Waterstones and Amazon. Click HERE for more info.