For the seventh
Free Comic Book Day (FCBD), Saturday, May 3, 2008, I decided to do a comic-shop crawl to compare and contrast how different retailers approached the event. Including travel time, I hit five local stores in five hours.[1] Although each of the comics shops I went to occupied a slightly different niche, overall, the retailers were professional: each store had good customer service, was relatively clean and organized, and carried at least a token amount of indy comics and manga.
Before I begin, however, a little background on FCBD might be useful: to participate, comics publishers submit applications to a panel "of publishers, suppliers, retailers, and Diamond Comic Distributors" according to the
FCBD website. There are 10 "Gold" level slots from the big companies like Marvel, DC and Archie. About 30-50 "Silver" level comics are also offered. Zanadu Comics owner Perry Plush clarified, "A store can buy as many copies of the any comics offered. To be listed on the FCBD website a store must order 25 copies of the full line of the Gold level. Nothing is mandatory. [...] If a store could care less as being listed, they could order whatever titles they cared about. Ordering Gold was not required." According to Johanna Draper Carlson, retailers then buy the comics at about 25 – 50 cents a copy and offer them for free on the appointed date to lure new customers into their store.[2]
My first stop was
Golden Age Collectables (GAC), which opens at 9 a.m. to better coordinate with the business hours of its location, Pike Place Market: to broaden its appeal to its tourist demographic, GAC also sells movie scripts and memorabilia, toys, lunchboxes and other tchotchkes. Beginning with GAC, I discovered that each store displayed and distributed the free comics differently. At GAC, they put all of the promotional comics in a spinner rack with a sign that said that the first comic was free: after that, you could take another one from the rack with a purchase. Like all of the other comic-book shops I wound up at, GAC piggybacked another marketing tool on top of FCBD: an appearance by Spider-Man, slated for later that day. Following another trend I observed at all of the shops was that GAC's FCBD hand-outs didn't just contain this year's releases, but comics from previous FCBDs. I spoke to Tony Morigi, who's been a manager there for 13 years. The store was teeming with children (despite the fact that it was early enough the Market was only a little crowded), and he said that, during FCBD, "we have many kids come to our store that say they have never read a comic before. We usually have some free comics on hand year round to give to them, but it's nice on Free Comic Book Day to have such a large selection for them to choose from. Hopefully when they go home to whatever city or state they are from, they'll like the free comic enough that they'll look up their local comic shop and become a new reader." GAC's indy FCBD pickings were slim, but Morigi said the store's tourist-patrons tended to gravitate toward what the most well-known material. He wished, however, that the companies overall had offered more original material, especially DC.
Throughout the day, I observed that Marvel was more prominent than DC in all of the stores' FCBD choices, especially in regards to summer-movie tie-in characters (although several retailers said that they wanted Iron Man to have his own FCBD title, instead of having to share it in
Iron Man/Hulk Sampler). I'm not sure why this is: it could have been that there was a new rule this year that all FCBD comics had to be "all-ages (probably, as Carlson points out, because of the Gordon Lee trial),"[3] and it would have been difficult to tie in a Batman comic when
The Dark Knight movie is definitely not, and/or it could have had to do with the fact that DC is so crossover-and-continuity heavy at the moment that
All Star Superman #1 was their only option for a top-selling, accessible title (their Silver contribution was
Tiny Titans #1).
I headed to both of Zanadu's storefronts next, first downtown and then in the University District. At approximately 10:30 a.m.
the downtown location (located in the clothing retail district) was nearly empty, but employee Erin Butler[4] informed by that that was because all of the action was up north at the University District store, where they were having a back-issue blowout in the basement. Out of all of the comic shops I hit, Zanadu has the best indy and manga selections, and this was reflected in their FCBD selections (two per customer, spread over the cash-register island). I picked up
Drawn & Quarterly's Gekiga! and
Nerd Burgler, an anthology of Portland artists such as Sarah Oleksyk and Elijah Brubaker.[5] The latter made me appreciate that Zanadu had made a point of including work from local cartoonists in their array; it's something Zanadu is good at in general, and even though FCBD is not designed for it, I think building an audience for local cartoonists is a smart move for a specialty comics retailer.
The University District Zanadu was fairly full when I arrived. The
Iron Man/Hulk Sampler and
Amelia Rules! comics were moving briskly (and
Owly was highly recommended), but I picked up two indy titles:
Hayes Carll in The Search for Ooga Kabooga Juice and Other Adventures, written by the musician and drawn by José Luis González, and a mini anthology,
Candy or Medicine. Select back issues were $1 a comic, $7 a pound. Zanadu owner Perry Plush was manning the basement, and, to paraphrase, he said that, while Zanadu's FCBD assortment spotlights what sells best for them (all of the retailers said that), FCBD hopefully draws in new people, whose tastes can then be studied. He also expressed a hope I heard from many of the retailers throughout the day, that FCBD would help encourage experimentation with new material.[6]
Stormtroopers milled outside of
Comics Dungeon to attract attention: inside, the shop, which is mostly mainstream-focused but has a decent indy selection[7], had the widest selection of free comics (many of which were overstock as opposed to official FCBD promos, spread over three counters), and customers could choose up to eight. There were quite a few children there, as well: employee Chris Casos remarked that 2008's FCBD had more for them than in previous years (certainly because of the all-ages mandate. He also talked up the
Owly). There were a few creators signing: writer
Tom Peyer (
The Flash,
The Simpsons,
Tek Jansen) and Phil and Kaja Foglio (
Girl Genius), but there were only one or two people talking to them while I was there, probably because signings have more appeal for hardcore fans than the brand-new comics readers that FCBD aims for.
I concluded my crawl with
Dreamstrands Comics & Such, which is pretty mainstream. Like Comics Dungeon, they had spilled out onto the sidewalk to draw passersby: a tented area outside of the store sheltered longboxes full of $1 back issues from the drizzling rain: an area off to the side was set up for the
Pirates: At Ocean's Edge card game and HeroClix (there were free
Iron Man HeroClix and packs of cards), and had a table with the FCBD comics that were aimed at the youngest children, which I thought was a good touch. (There were also some flyers for a webcomic that wasn't officially part of FCBD: I was surprised there wasn't more of that kind of thing, considering that the FCBD panel rejected print webcomics anthologies this year.[8]) Inside the store, a couple of children played with the helium balloons that were being handed out, and clientele were allowed to take five or six comics apiece while back issues priced at under $30 were 50 percent off for the day. Much of what store owner Gabriel Hagman said echoed other retailers I had spoken to: he was happy that FCBD had settled on a consistent date, the first Saturday in May; and that thanks to previous FCBD experience, he was careful to order enough comics to last not only all day (this was a concern for all of the retailers, as they had often run out of titles during previous events) but as promotional supplies and giveaways for all year.
I was a bit surprised to realize that many of the retailers didn't know what was going on at other local comic shops when they asked me about what the other stores were doing[9]: I know that they're all competitors for a pretty small market, but perhaps the next step would be for the stores in larger cities to combine their efforts, especially now that FCBD is getting more media attention, as several retailers noted. I saw other customers going from store to store, like me, so perhaps more fans and retailers could work together in the future to organize something like those "Taste of" or "Dine Around Seattle"-type events that restaurants do, only on a much, much smaller scale.[10]
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Professional AttireNotes[1] I managed to hit every comic shop in my range on the Free Comic Book Day participating-locater list except for Arcane Comics & More in Ballard. Maybe next year.
[2] Although, as Johanna Draper Carlson noted
here and
here, it's not that simple.
[3]
http://comicsworthreading.com/2007/12/06/fcbd-books-now-must-all-be-for-all-ages/[4]She and her fellow employee also imparted this information: Butler (who's worked at the store for six years) said that movies
do bring people into the shop — although primarily it's non-mainstream comics movies such as
Ghost World that do it. (However, she then went on to cite two DC titles,
V For Vendetta and
Hellblazer, as examples, so my guess is that her idea of non-mainstream is non-superhero.) Still, it does lend weight to Dirk Deppey's theory of why anime and manga have better synergy than superhero movies and superhero comics do.
[5]I refrained from picking up
Fantagraphics' FCBD I.G.N.A.T.Z. sampler at any of the stores, because I didn't want a retailer to have to pay for my copy when I could get one directly from work.
[6]Zanadu's been in business for 33 years. Plush also noted that he began as a used bookseller, and that the comics market was moving back to that.
[7]Their manga selection seemed smaller than the last time I was there: when asked about it, Chris Casos said that they were still working out how to display manga, and while he was happy to pre-order it for customers, that according to the "pie chart," it was not a priority for the store.
[8]
http://comicsworthreading.com/2007/12/26/fcbd-webcomic-related-titles-rejected/[9]Each store had that info displayed on their website.
[10]This is probably in the realm of pure fantasy, but as someone who spent two hours getting to one of the stores and back on the bus, a shop-to-shop shuttle (provided by the city?) would be AWESOME. (Parking in Seattle is not optimal, so I'm sure that would appeal to car owners as well.)
Image credits:
EC: From "Under Cover," written by Bill Gaines & Al Feldstein and drawn by Wally Wood, in
EC Sampler: Free Comic Book Day [©2008 William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc.]
Nerdburger: From "The Lone Wolf and the Search for the Missing Babooshka" by Jennifer Parks in Nerd Burgler. [©2008 Jennifer Parks]
D&Q: From Seiichi Hayashi's "Red Colored Elegy," excerpted in Gekiga! Drawn & Quarterly Free Comic Book Day 2008. [©2008 Seiichi Hayashi]
Graphic Classics: From "A Narrow Escape" by Lord Dunsany, adapted by Milton Knight, in
Graphic Classics: Special Edition. [©2008 Eureka Productions]
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008
