http://www.freecomicbookday.com/


Any hope we can get any new blood in the hobby this year??

There's also a free HeroClix fig available at participating retailers!

Should we banner this on the site here?

I plan on going to my local shops early that morning and getting a stack of the comics to hand out to my kid customers at the toy store I work at.....maybe I can get us a few new recruits that way...

Anyone else have any ideas of how to maximize the benefits for the industry using these free books?

You can always make sure kids get access to free comics--even if they're not the ones the comic stores are giving away. Last Free Comic Book Day, I bought a few issues of <i>Spider-Girl</i> and asked my retailer to give them away to young readers who didn't already read the book.

-Comp

You're a good guy, Ed.

I'm inclined not to have IMWAN support this. If y'all feel strongly about it, feel free to outvote me and keep posting to this thread, we'll sticky it ... not sure if Dan will be back from Baltimore (47th trip this year, I think!) in time to change the banner again though.

I have a few reasons for disliking the Free Comic Day thing. It's "well-meaning" on the part of some people in the industry but has never been thought through properly. They give away loads of books which are allegedly kid-friendly, or new reader-friendly, but the followup is minimal or non-existent. For example they hand out a reprint of Hulk #1 from 1963 (when the movie came out) but there are no new books that remotely resemble the character a kid just read for the first time. Or they find an FF comic in the Sunday paper, like when that shopowner had thousands of free issues distributed, but they can't find a store locally to followup on this new interest. Stickers and leaflets with an 800-number to find a comic shop are absurd beyond measure. Few kids will bother, and even fewer parents are going to drive 50 miles for a comic book. The new interest dies aborning.

I've experienced this scenario way too often at my job as well. I get the kid-friendly trades, they eat them up, but there's no way to become a "regular reader" after that. No local comic shops, or if they find stuff somewhere it's the "mature" versions. They end up watching the cartoons and the movies, buying the toys. (That's how children really get their superhero jollies nowadays, through any medium except the books themselves.)

And ... this is more of a generalised disgust about the situation ... I am very tired of being told by the industry that it is our "responsibility to save them". Tired of the guiltripping. They fucked over their business themselves. They're not paying us one penny to fix this mess for them. And when we do try to get involved, gratis, we're more times than not slapped down as worthless geeks rather than valued customers ... we're the people who pay their salaries and always have, and I'll be damned if we should do QuesaDio's work for him as well. So as far as I'm concerned they can clean up the mess they made themselves, and if they can't, too bad for them. If there were no more new comics published at all by the Big Two we wouldn't be losing much ... the future of their characters is much more about licensing to other media, and the future of comics in general lies in new creations, indies, web comics, stuff like that.

You make some very good points there Linda...I keep having a thought about how all of DC's and Marvel's ongoing storylines will just be transferred into animated form one day....one hour long weekly cartoon shown on TV or thru the Internet...they would make probably more money thru ads on it than they do the comics now.

I'm suddenly a lot more involved in Free Comic Book Day than I was an hour ago.

Check out http://www.girlamatic.com tomorrow. This is a subscription webcomics site, but the archives can be viewed free of charge from 12:01am to 11:59pm EST on May 7. Recommended reading: The Stiff by Jason Thompson and Li'l Mell, written by my wife and illustrated by a number of different artists (me, currently).

Also, Diamond came through with their promise to get schools, libraries and other institutions involved, and sent a completely free stash of books to my place of work, the Cartoon Art Museum (http://www.cartoonart.org) in San Francisco. No purchase required, no shipping charges on our end, just a stack of books to give away to our patrons this weekend.

Like Linda said, who knows if this is going to have any long-range effects or not, but it's worth a shot. By this time next year, Marvel (and DC and other publishers, hopefully) should be back into 7-11's and, if the current trends are any indication, should have an even better presence in chain bookstores.

It is a bit mind-boggling that there needs to be a massive promotion just to let people know that comic books are still being published and that some of them might even be interesting enough to purchase, isn't it?

That is a brilliant way to do Free Comic Day. (Wish the legacy paper companies would explore this.)

Andy, I'm damn glad yer here!