Despite the best efforts of all involved, the return from Leeds was made with minds, bodies and souls mostly intact.  Thought Bubble was excellent fun, and damned inspirational to boot. What more could we ask for? Erasure being played as requested on the Saturday night, that’s what, but then we are very difficult to please…

So we begrudgingly return to the real world. We playfully teased you last week with a mention of Reads Issue 1, the new home of all things comic-like in the world that was and will once more be Tiny Dancing. Now we are coy no more. It is time to let it all hang out.

We showed you the wraparound cover, dreamt up in a fever by Ricky Miller and realised in a storm by Rebecca Strickson, and we told you it was amazing. But we were wrong. It’s also great – and how do we know this? Because Jock told us, that’s how. A wise as well as very nice man – we suspected as much.

But what else is there?

Well as this is a first issue we thought we’d give you a bit of hot value. That explains the 48 pages (48!) that contain the next instalments of Ricky and Steve Horry’s dinosaur infested Hilary Harper expedition, Tim Bird’s beautiful musings on youth in suburbia, Michael Gosden’s first glimpse of the fate that awaits Shelby Matthews (I even helped a bit with that one), and Ricky rounding things off with the final pieces of the Metroland puzzle he’s been putting in place in order to introduce the band. Here are some temptingly arty photos of all that:

I’m really not being a mental when I assure you that everyone involved has produced their best work, and that for the bargain price of £3.00 you will be owning something that we really are rather proud of. Get your hands on a copy by doing the Paypals on the www.tinydancing.co.uk site, or by sending me an email to work out what we call in these parts a ‘solution’. It’s what we’re all about. Unless we’re in a casino in Leeds at 4am, when we’ve got to be up in about four hours to try and be retail professionals for an entire day. That one we still need to put some work into.

– Dave