The Dark went live on the Playstation Digital Comics network last week and my good friend Lee was kind enough to tweet me these shots of the comic up and running on his PSP!

I heard from Harry at Markosia that the book has been doing very well indeed in terms of downloads and the guys at Sony have tweeted me recently to say there has been a lot of positive fan feedback. Great news!

If you’ve got a PSP and you have downloaded the book, I’d love to know what you think.

To celebrate the launch of “The Dark”, Markosia are producing a limited run of just 100 copies of the “Bristol Expo Special Edition”!

The official promotional text runs as follows:

To celebrate the launch of their new graphic novel, “The Dark”, Markosia are producing a special edition of the book exclusively for Bristol Expo visitors.

With a variant cover from series artist Rick Lundeen, there will be only one hundred of these individually signed and numbered editions available.

A great opportunity to read the graphic novel that critics are calling “highly original“, “a great, fast read“, “confident” and “some of Chris Lynch’s best work to date” as well as owning a piece of comics history. The Dark’s author, Chris Lynch, will be at the Markosia stand throughout Comic Expo!

The Bristol Comic Expo is an immensely important event for me as a creator. It is were I had my first self publishing experiences, were I first met most of the many good friends I now have in the comics community, were I first met Harry Markos and discovered Markosia, and were I first made the decision that this, this crazy comic book making thing … this was what I wanted to do. Forever.

It feels great to be bring the special edition of The Dark to the show were, for me, it all started. All that remains is for me to get on an sign and individually number every single one of them*.

* Yes, I know. I said in my interview with Comic Book Outsiders that I would never individually number anything by hand ever again. I think Harry Markos was listening, and this is his revenge.

OK, you’ll need to excuse the pun. Ace is a superlative I don’t think I’ve used since junior school. I put it away in the big-box-of-words-I-no-longer-use along with “mega”, “brill” (except when referring to the fish), and “wicked” (except when describing witches and rather nifty anthology comics from FutureQuake Press.

Something that is genuinely, actually, and properly ace though is the new Ace Comics website, not least because the guys at Ace have been kind enough to place The Dark and Freeman front and centre on their brand new homepage for your pre-ordering pleasure.

The guys at Ace are proper comics retailers – passionate about the medium, supportive of homegrown talent, and damn good people across the board. We need more guys like this, out there on the front line. So, visit the site.

That is all …

To celebrate the launch of The Dark, we have arranged a very special prize draw, with our esteemed publisher Markosia, to win a signed copy of The Dark. The competition is simple to enter, just tweet our URL “http://www.thedarkcomicbook.com” anytime between now and January 31st. Every tweet will count as an entry, and a winning tweet (and tweeter) will be selected at random on February 1st 2010.

It would be fantastic if we could make The Dark a trending topic on Twitter, but I’ll settle for knowing that we’ve got the word out there to comics fandom and that someone, somewhere, will be enjoying a copy of The Dark gratis. As they say in the National Lottery adverts … Maybe, just maybe …

Full terms and conditions for the draw are available from our website.

Rick, Harry, and I have all been interviewed by the Hypergeek website about the forthcoming release of The Dark.

We all answered our questions seperately, and it is interesting to see the areas in which we see the book differently as well as the areas in which we agree!

A great chance to get a little “behind the scenes” peek at the workings of a trans-atlantic creative team and a trans-atlantic publisher.

And, of course, I give a few little clues away as to what the big mystery is in “The Dark” …

Read “Illuminating The Dark: Talking to Chris Lynch, Rick Lundeen, and Harry Markos About AAM Markosia’s Latest Graphic Novel” here.

The first official press release for my new comic book mini-series “The Dark”, with AAM/Markosia, was despatched today.

The first issue should be available digitally from August, with the remaining four issues out by the end of the year, with a graphic novel version in the works shortly after that.

There is a preview version online that you rate and comment upon:

http://www.thedarkcomicbook.com

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The Birmingham International Comics Show (BICS) is back, bigger and better than ever before for 2009! And, as usual, Monkeys with Machineguns will be there!

After our exhibiting hiatus at last year’s BICS, we will be proudly sharing a double sized exhibitor space with the fine fellows of Orang Utan Comics and David Wynne at the 2009 show. Having seen life on both sides of the table at last year’s Birmingham International Comics Show, the first convention I have ever attended as anything other than an exhibitor, I think it is a fantastic show and one worthy of pride of place in the autumn/winter convention schedule.

As well as exhibiting our wares at the table I am single handledly trying to have dubbed “Monkeypalooza”, Stu and I will also be spending some time at the Markosia stand where you will be able to talk to us about our upcoming projects The Magpye and The Dark, and at the Insomnia Publications table where I will be talking about my new project The Fictionalists. We will also be at the pre-show party on Friday night. At present, however, we have no plans (despite encouragement from quite a few people) to repeat the monumental feat of Monkeys with Machineguns Live! (Although, anyone who wants to see if they can goad Pete Rogers and I into finally having our “write off/face off” …)

Overall, BICS is shaping up to be a fantastic show and if you haven’t already booked tickets, a table, or registered as a professional, I heartily advise the application of skates to feet … pronto.

Cy Dethan is a man with his finger on the pulse so when he says “Beware! It’s the Future – It Will Burn You!“, I have to prick up my ears (or, as this the internet my eyes) and listen (read).

What Cy’s posting about is the publication of some Markosia back catalogue stuff via iTunes as an iPhone application and the future publication of the same to Google Android phones, Blackberrys etc. in the near future. Very exciting stuff, especially when you get your head around the size of this market place and how accessible the content becomes when it this these platforms.

I had intended to download Beowulf #1 as a trail and tell you how good it was but, sadly, I can’t. I do not own an iPhone or an iPod. I own a Nokia 5800, which is technically far superior, sexier, does more, but lacks access to iPhone applications. When iPhone applications where just glorified web pages and calculators for working out your share of a bill, I didn’t care. But now the iPhone has comics, and thusly I am vexed. I also maybe have to rethink my comments about accessibility, but that’s a job for another time.

So, no free content for me. Until I buy an iPod Touch, I guess.