{"id":5720,"date":"2009-05-01T17:17:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-01T17:17:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-28T03:07:23","modified_gmt":"2020-07-28T03:07:23","slug":"ice-cream-and-genesis-of-free-comic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/01\/ice-cream-and-genesis-of-free-comic\/","title":{"rendered":"Ice cream and the genesis of Free Comic Book Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

Free Comic Book Day<\/span><\/a> is this Saturday, and in this eighth edition it has become a fixture in the comics year. Since its inception in 2002, more than a hundred special edition comics have been created for retailers to distribute \u2014 not just on Free Comic Book Day, of course, but throughout the year \u2014 but having a single day to serve as the summer season kickoff has been a plus for many retailers. This year, there’s even a Hugh Jackman public service ad<\/span><\/a> promoting the day, a nice give-back to the comics that gave Hollywood its Wolverine.<\/p>\n

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

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

In “The Power of Free” \u2014 I don’t know if it was his headline or the copy desk’s \u2014 Joe spoke of how Baskin-Robbins had held its annual Free Scoop Night on May 2, 2001. The event resulted, he wrote, in the ice cream store near his shop moving 1,300 scoops in four hours, meaning that’s how many patrons came through the door. Joe wrote that he’d suggested a national comics “open house” event to Diamond Comic Distributors<\/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> comics still distributed in restaurants. I’ve done a lot of research into those and several other giveaway lines over the years \u2014 and it’s plain that many of the people who learned to read comics (and, odd as it sounds, the storytelling language of comics is something one does have to learn to read) learned it from ones they got for free. Most of those comics went completely away in the 1980s and 1990s. Joe’s suggestion in the article was that publishers could create sampler comics for their different lines \u2014 “just as Baskin-Robbins has 31 flavors of ice cream… a selection of samplers available from different publishers would allow stores to better cover the disparate tastes of those who’ll show up.”<\/p>\n

\"\"Joe suggested a variety of steps that could be taken by publishers, retailers, and creators; I’ve posted the original article pages here, which I hope he doesn’t mind. Click the pages to see them larger. It shows that many of those ideas, relating to the production and distribution of the samplers, were pretty close to what was eventually adopted. 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>, and a year and two days after the Baskin-Robbins event that Joe said provided the partial inspiration. The magazine followed the progress of the event, and was happy to be associated \u2014 our Maggie Thompson attended many of the FCBD board meetings as an advisor. But it all came from Joe \u2014 and Diamond and the major publishers’ evident agreement that, as he had written, 2001 was the beginning of a turnaround for comics, a new opportunity. “There’s a strong sense among many retailers with whom I’ve spoken that we’re definitely experiencing a resurgence of sales and customers,” he wrote. “A promotion like this could be the calling card we need to give our market strong forward momentum.”<\/p>\n

And it did. A few years later, both the sportscard and gaming hobbies put together similar events, organizers citing the FCBD experience as a positive reason to go forward. And FCBD still goes forward. I’ll be there \u2014 signing my own comics work at Galaxy Comics in Stevens Point, Wis., from 1-4. Wherever you are, do your part and bring a new reader out to your local shop!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Free Comic Book Day is this Saturday, and in this eighth edition it has become a fixture in the comics year. Since its inception in 2002, more than a hundred special edition comics have been created for retailers to distribute \u2014 not just on Free Comic Book Day, of course, but throughout the year \u2014 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5721,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[58,91],"class_list":["post-5720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-free-comic-book-day","tag-giveaway-comics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5720","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=5720"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5723,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5720\/revisions\/5723"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}