{"id":4749,"date":"2014-04-30T17:04:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-30T17:04:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-08-01T15:02:12","modified_gmt":"2020-08-01T20:02:12","slug":"secret-origins-of-free-comic-book-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2014\/04\/30\/secret-origins-of-free-comic-book-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Secret origins of Free Comic Book Day"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

Saturday, May 3 is Free Comic Book Day<\/a><\/b>, the thirteenth observance of the comics industry’ official holiday \u2014 and for the first time in many years, I won’t be appearing at a comic shop, but rather will be signing at Comicfest<\/b><\/a> in Denver. (Conventions are important to comics, too!) Appearing places to talk about my comics and other work<\/b><\/a> that weekend has been a tradition for me, and in something else
\nthat’s become a tradition for this site, I’m retelling the story of how an event
\nwhich began with a suggestion by a retailer in the\u00a0pages of a trade
\nmagazine has\u00a0 become a major happening in stores around the world, and
\nthe kickoff not just for the summer but most of the comic book year for
\nmany publishers.<\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
There
\nhad been earlier hopes for an equivalent to the milk marketing board in
\ncomics \u2014 some kind of advertising council \u2014 over the years, including a
\npublisher-and-distributor attempt in the mid-1990s that met several
\ntimes but never generated much of anything before it vanished in the
\nindustry’s collapse that decade. The idea for Free Comic Book Day, by
\ncontrast, came from the retail sector \u2014 or, rather, from a retailer: Joe Field<\/span>, owner of Flying Colors Comics<\/span><\/a> in California.<\/div>\n

\"\"I had signed Joe on in the late 1990s as a monthly columnist for Comics\u00a0& Games Retailer <\/span>magazine,
\na trade publication that went for free each month to most of the comics
\nshops in North America. Like the other columnists, Joe’s contributions
\nranged from commentary on retail issues to practical advice \u2014 and in June 2001<\/span><\/a>,
\njust as the comics industry was beginning to emerge from the disaster
\nof the 1990s, Joe advised us he had a special column on the way, along
\nwith something unusual: an instantaneous response from the Powers That
\nBe being addressed.<\/p>\n

In “The Power of Free,” Joe spoke
\nof how Baskin-Robbins had held its annual Free Scoop Night on May 2,
\n2001. The event resulted, he wrote, in the ice cream store near his shop
\nmoving 1,300 scoops in four hours, meaning that’s how many patrons came
\nthrough the door. Joe wrote that he’d suggested a national comics “open
\nhouse” event to Diamond Comic Distributors<\/a><\/span> in 1997; now, he thought, the key element to add would be giveaway comics.<\/p>\n

Giveaway comics were a major<\/span> source of new readers for the comics industry over its history, from the March of Comics<\/span> issues given away at shoe stores to the Big Boy<\/span>
\ncomics still distributed in restaurants. I’ve done a lot of research
\ninto those and several other giveaway lines over the years \u2014 and it’s
\nplain that many of the people who learned to read comics (and, odd as it
\nsounds, the storytelling language of comics is something one does have
\nto learn to read) learned it from ones they got for free. Most of those
\ncomics went completely away in the 1980s and 1990s. Joe’s suggestion in
\nthe article was that publishers could create sampler comics for their
\ndifferent lines \u2014 “just as Baskin-Robbins has 31 flavors of ice cream…
\na selection of samplers available from different publishers would allow
\nstores to better cover the disparate tastes of those who’ll show up.”<\/p>\n

\"\"Joe
\nsuggested a variety of steps that could be taken by publishers,
\nretailers, and creators; I’ve posted the original article pages here,
\nwhich I hope he doesn’t mind. Click the pages to see them larger. It
\nshows that many of those ideas, relating to the production and
\ndistribution of the samplers, were pretty close to what was eventually
\nadopted. It also shows the sidebar response from Diamond’s Roger Fletcher<\/span>, embracing the idea and promising to solicit retailer interest in the idea.<\/p>\n

And it happened. The first Free Comic Book Day was on May 4 of the following year \u2014 right after the release of Spider-Man<\/span>,
\nand a year and two days after the Baskin-Robbins event that Joe said
\nprovided the partial inspiration. The magazine followed the progress of
\nthe event, and was happy to be associated \u2014 our Maggie Thompson attended
\nmany of the FCBD board meetings as an advisor. But it all came from Joe
\n\u2014 and Diamond and the major publishers’ evident agreement that, as he
\nhad written, 2001 was the beginning of a turnaround for comics, a new
\nopportunity. “There’s a strong sense among many retailers with whom I’ve
\nspoken that we’re definitely experiencing a resurgence of sales and
\ncustomers,” he wrote. “A promotion like this could be the calling card
\nwe need to give our market strong forward momentum.”<\/p>\n

And
\nit did. A few years later, both the sportscard and gaming hobbies put
\ntogether similar events, organizers citing the FCBD experience as a
\npositive reason to go forward. And FCBD still goes forward.<\/p>\n

Lots of free comics are on offer this year: you can find the full list of titles here<\/a><\/b>. Participating stores and their events<\/b><\/a> can also be found on their website.\u00a0There’s also a handy FAQ page<\/a><\/b> on the site.\u00a0If your local comic shop is not listed, give them a call for a complete list of events and signings.
\n<\/p>\n

(Programming note: Should the Diamond April sales reports release
\nwhile I’m at Starfest, expect to see the analysis here after I return.)\u00a0 <\/i><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Saturday, May 3 is Free Comic Book Day, the thirteenth observance of the comics industry’ official holiday \u2014 and for the first time in many years, I won’t be appearing at a comic shop, but rather will be signing at Comicfest in Denver. (Conventions are important to comics, too!) Appearing places to talk about my … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4750,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[58],"class_list":["post-4749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-free-comic-book-day"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4749"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6435,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4749\/revisions\/6435"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}