The Secret Origin of Free Comic Book Day

I wrote a thread on Twitter about Free Comic Book Day this year, but it was pretty long and I still had to leave out a lot. After I posted it, I discovered a trove of original documents on my computer. So for the sake of posterity, here’s everything from that Twitter thread and more!

It’s been twenty years of Free Comic Book Day. As the guy who was there at the beginning, I thought y’all might be interested in a little time travel. Come with me now to the halcyon days of late 2001…

It started with a magazine called Comics Retailer and a man named Joe Field.

Joe owned (and owns!) Flying Colors, an amazing comic book store in the Bay Area. He noticed one day that the Baskin-Robbins store nearby was getting a hell of a lot of business when they gave away free scoops. He wondered if maybe comics could do something similar.

So he wrote an open letter in Comics Retailer proposing the idea of a coordinated day of giving away comics.

At the time, I was working at Diamond Comic Distributors, managing all non-Previews publications. So I was in charge of the order forms, the weekly newsletter, the monthly retailer magazine, all of Diamond’s websites, plus ad hoc stuff like ads, marketing materials, etc.

It was…a lot.

I was summoned one day into the office of Roger Fletcher, VP of Marketing. Also there was my direct boss, Shelley Myers, Executive Director of Marketing. I think Bill Schanes, VP of Purchasing, was there, too. Not sure.

Roger asked me if I’d read Joe’s open letter. I said I had. “Do you think we should do something like that?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” I said.

“OK,” said Roger. “You’re in charge. Make it happen.”

Now, the operations side of things was handled by Cindy Fournier, VP of Operations — it was her task to arrange separate warehouse procedures to handle the influx of free comics from the publishers. Which was no small task! To her credit, I believe there was never a glitch in any FCBD shipping, at least not while I was at Diamond.

But FCBD was — and is — a marketing effort. At the end of the day, if the books are in the stores and no one comes in to get them (and, ideally, to be seduced into buying something while they’re there!), then the event is a failure.

The date May 4, 2002 was chosen. Because that was the day after the premiere of the first Spider-Man movie, which had all the hallmarks of being a mega-hit. It seemed like a natural media hook.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but far from being “one more thing” on my already overflowing plate, FCBD would grow to consume all of my work time. Fortunately, I had a great team working under me — Lance Woods, Scott Braden, Jeff Mills… I think Abby Horman was handling the order form by then, but I might be off by a year.

My desk became covered with post-it notes related to FCBD, and I was so busy that I literally did not have the time to organize them or transfer them to a more permanent medium. I knew by muscle memory where each note was on the desk and didn’t dare move them. So at some point, I grabbed a tape gun and basically laminated the top of my desk so that nothing would move or get lost. Scott came into my office after FCBD was over, looked at the desk, and said, “You oughtta get that framed and hang it on your wall.”

(I kinda wish I had. Or at least taken a picture for posterity.)

In this age of billion-dollar super-hero franchises, it may seem quaint, but at the time, FCBD was considered a pretty revolutionary idea. Comics were still in the doldrums of the big bust of the nineties, and here the industry was coming together to promote itself. It was a pretty big deal.

My budget was zero dollars.

Zero.

I was supposed to launch the industry’s first-ever industry-wide promotional event and I had no money.

So I picked up the phone. I started cold-calling and cold-emailing everyone I could think of. Every news contact I had. Every organization focused on promotion and marketing. TV Guide! Cartoon Network! I tracked down every reporter I could find who had ever done a story about comic books and bombarded them.

I got lucky. A lot.

Started calling USA Today, CNN, everyone I could think of. Realize I had zero experience in this sort of thing. I was just making lists of everyone I could think of that would have any interest whatsoever. I called, e-mailed, filled out contact forms. At the time, MasterCard was doing it’s “Priceless” ad campaign, and I came up with a hook to tie it into FCBD. I called them repeatedly and never heard back. Which is probably sensible on their part, but damn, it would have been cool!

I  managed to connect with a woman named Susan Nave at SYFY. (They were Sci-Fi Channel back then.) Stargate SG-1 and Farscape were about to launch new seasons, and it seemed like a good fit. Sci-Fi hired the inestimably talented Neal Adams to draw an original piece of art celebrating those series. Then Diamond arranged to have that art printed on thousands of backing boards that were sent free to store for giveaway, along with comic sleeves with the Sci-Fi logo. A week before FCBD, Sci-Fi ran a day of super-hero programming and promoted the event on-air.

It was perfect except that there was some kind of glitch where the guy in charge of the bags and boards at Diamond never told me about a production charge that came to something like $1500. I remember calling Sci-Fi Channel, petrified that they were going to ream me out, but they just laughed and said, “Is that it? No problem.”

What a difference between the budgets in TV and comics!

We offered press releases and as many assets as we could to local stores. One of the things I did was try to explain to local stores how to get local coverage. That was my big brainstorm — this event was coordinated at the national (and international) level, but it was really thousands of local events all happening at once. A story on the evening news would be great, sure, but even better would be a story in the local paper pointing potential customers right at the local store.

I was literally the only person in the comic book industry at the time whose job description included the phrase “promote comic books.” I mean, sure DC had someone to promote DC comics and Marvel had someone to promote Marvel comics, but there was no one tasked with promoting comics themselves as a medium.

One of the biggest issues was internal to the industry — there was a lot of tension between the big publishers in those days, especially DC and Marvel. No one wanted to do something that would help their bottom line if there was a chance it would also help their rival’s. Ugh. Until the event could be proven and popular, no one was really going to go all-out. In a way, we were lucky just to get them on-board at all!

After months of work, the day itself arrived. I went to two local comic book stores on that first FCBD. Both were ill-attended and had no customer bump to speak of.

The event was a dismal failure. I was a dismal failure.

I wallowed for the entire weekend. I had given it my all and it hadn’t worked. It was pretty goddamn depressing.

Well, at least Spider-Man was good, right?

The Monday after FCBD, I trekked into the office. Stared glumly at my desk, a mocking reminder of all my fruitless labor.

While my computer slowly chugged through its boot-up process, I checked my voicemail. The excited voice of Patty Jeres from DC Comics erupted forth from the speaker: “Barry! You did it! Congratulations!”

What the hell was she talking about?

And then my email came up and I understood.

Dozens and dozens and dozens of emails. From readers. Customers. Retailers. All of them describing amazing, wonderful FCBD events at stores around the world. Photos and testimonials and thanks from everywhere.

Somehow, I had managed to visit the only two stores in the world with miserable inaugural Free Comic Book Days.

(Since, one of those stores has gone out of business. The other is still humming along and pretty quickly figured out how to make FCBD work and now has a great Free Comic Book Day every year.)

So…it worked. I couldn’t believe it.

I had a couple of days of clean-up, then jumped back into my normal job, getting caught up. Soon enough, the Powers that Were informed me that the event had gone so well that we were going to do it again.

And then again. And again. All the way until today.

My last FCBD from behind the desk was 2005, my last year at Diamond before I quit to pursue writing. (In fact, I left exactly one month after FCBD 2005, figuring I would see through the event and the necessary post mortem and clean-up before going.) I remember being of two minds when I left. On the one hand, I wanted the event to continue in my absence. On the other, I kinda wanted it to fall apart without me.

Well, it didn’t. If anything, it got bigger and better, which — on some days — makes me wonder if I was holding it back!

Anyway, Happy FCBD! And here’s to many, many more! Put on a mask and go get a free comic book today! (freecomicbookday.com will tell you where to go!)

As a bonus for reading this far, here are some more documents from the past!