The Price of Freedom

I like Free Comic Book Day for a multitude of reasons. I mean, free stuff is good, but free comics is awesome! It also exposes me to a lot of titles that I haven't looked at or been aware of before.

But I also get a chance to share my love of comics in a more acceptable way. I'm not telling people they should go out and start buying comics, I'm telling them how to get free stuff. I start a month or so before the event, put up a sign at work, mention it once in a while. More often the week before. And on the Friday of Free Comic Book Day Eve, I was asking people if they wanted me to tell them the closest places to find participating retailers.  There's also a lot of positive media coverage with little of the old Zap Pow stereotypes showing up any more.


Carrie and I were planning a nice day trip for that Saturday, yardsales in the early morning, Zimmies in Lewiston, then a drive down to Portland to hit Casablanca and a few non-comics stores afterwards. Our cat Ghost curtailed the long trip as we had to take her to the vet. We still did yardsales and Zimmies, and we got to Bull Moose Music (in Lewiston) between. The selection at Bull Moose was paltry. I wasn't expecting much from Zimmies, but they surprised me with the number of free titles they were offering. They may even have had one of all the FCBD titles. We didn't try to get one of everything, just those that looked like they might be interesting.

We read most of the titles over the course of the next couple of days so that Carrie could bring a couple of them in for a coworker and I could bring all the others that weren't good enough to become part of the permanent collection (which was most of them) in to work to offer to my coworkers. I set them up by my desk and invited people to come over and take a few. So I again get to share my love of comics! The first one is free...

This is the second year I have also had my own comic to give out for this special day. The store clerks are always surprised and delighted to see the reverse of their give aways. This year I also ended up giving one out to a guy at a yardsale as he had a bunch of Dilbert and Calvin & Hobbes books.


As another follow up, a guy I knew when part of a mail art exchange group sent me a comic produced local to him for promoting literacy. Reading and using comics to promote reading are things I am a big fan of. The comic also mentions how an earlier comic created to do the same thing inspired a lot of kids to create their own comics. Another thing I think is great. Charlie had as an added bonus newspaper clippings about the local event that included much community interaction with the mayor in a Wonder Woman shirt. I brought these in to work and put them up in my cubicle for many people to come and marvel over.

And talking about pushing my buttons, he sent it all in in this envelope with a nice eclectic mix of stamps amongst which is his drawn self portrait as a stamp that his post office put a cancel on! Thanks Charlie.

To enlarge any picture, click on it and shout Shazam!