Free Comic Book Day 2014 – Acquisitions (Or Lack Thereof)


I used to be an avid comic book reader and collector growing up. I still have my very first issue(s) and don’t regret the potential thousands of dollars I probably cumulatively spent on them all. I have about four long boxes worth, classic and new. I stopped around the time life hit me hard and I realized that, although I loved the medium and the art form, I was realistically spending about 20 bucks a week at least on my titles. So, the week DC abandoned all their lines and rebooted their universe with the New 52, was officially the last week I bought comics regularly. I pick up a few titles here and there, at cons and such, but that’s it really.

I was with my girlfriend yesterday and decided it’d be fun to take her to my local comic store on Free Comic Book Day (which is the first Saturday in May). We arrived about 5pm… Too late really. All the good titles were gone. And FCBD doesn’t mean you can just grab anything you want. It means that the big name comic book distributors (and some small ones) release one-off generally insubstantial issues that you can grab and go for no charge. Since I came late there were only a few issues left to grab. Mostly childish stuff, as you can see below.
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Nothing substantial, but still a fun trip to the comic store. Brings back memories. To the long box! Did you pick up your Free Comic Book Day swag? Did you make out better than I? Lemme know.

10 thoughts on “Free Comic Book Day 2014 – Acquisitions (Or Lack Thereof)

  1. You did better than me, man. I was still recovering from a really bad cold yesterday and although I planned to pay a visit to my local comic book store, I couldn’t even muster up the energy to leave my house. And I totally get what you mean about life hitting you hard… I can hardly afford to follow the majority of my titles now so I’ve found myself cutting down to just two, until further notice.

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  2. http://www.facebook.com/outrightgeekery

    I was part of a huge event at my LCS as the crew from OutrightGeekery.com put on a series of Geek Jeopardy games. It was meant to keep asses in the store to boost sales, as well as promote the website and community overall, and, according to site stats, Facebook Likes, and store sales, it was a resounding success.

    FCBD should be more than a mad dash by readers and wannabes to a comic shop, or a shop dreading an increase in shoplifting for the day, and should be more about the Celebration of Geekness that incorporates the comics, games, and fellowship that surrounds these last bastions of the traditional hobby shop.

    Maybe I’m a romantic 🙂 But we reached for these goals on Saturday, and all involved felt we succeeded in that promise.

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    1. Oh wow, that’s really exciting you got to be a part of that. That’s just… outright geeky! Haha, love your crew’s name. I’m afraid I was one of those in and out shoplifters yesterday. That’s really cool bro.

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  3. Rather than FCBD, since I sell electronically through Amazon and sell a lot more online than in print, I just make one title free for the maximum length of time Amazon allows.

    The Doctor Holmes series I am doing now will be a FCBD giveaway since it is going into print and being properly marketed as well as going on Kindle.

    When I ran a comicbook store, FCBD made absolutely zero difference to my trade or attendance, but unusually we had a ton of kids in the store most days anyway, as well as the more typical adult readers. The kids played heroclix or RPGs instore all the time.

    I used to have a FCBD bin with big signs and put in the lameass FCBD special editions along with anything that Diamond had wrongly shipped, overshipped or wrecked in transit. So the bin was always full… 🙂

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      1. I always liked them but I was originally a professionally published writer from the age of 17 – pulp sci fi, fantasy and horror. Then I abandoned my two agents and had a more normal career, went back to writing, then found it too fatiguing to crank out books and had a crack at comics.

        As I said on my blog a while back, my writing greatly outpaces my art but I still want to draw my own stuff, at least partly as therapy from my day job. 🙂

        Most of my stuff looks pretty bad compared to the finish of say Disney or Warner comicbooks, but I have my niche. Also, I consciously go for a “saturday morning cartoons for grownups” kind of look usually. Very different from my “style” such as it was back in the 1980s and 1990s when it was all scritchy scratchy black lines.

        Another powerful motivator for me now in comics is that I LOATHE what has been done to a lot of the characters I used to love. So you sort of end up doing your own stuff in self defence almost. I know a lot of other indies are the same. 🙂

        Anyway- there you go.

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