Hey, he said it, not me! According to Newsarama, Marvel has announced that it’s gotten over its reservations about having next year’s Free Comic Book Day take place in May, as it has the past two years, despite the lack of a comic-themed movie to coincide with the event.
For those who don’t know, Free Comic Book Day is an industry-wide attempt to drum up new readership by giving away free copies of (ostensibly) their most new-reader-friendly or mainstream-appealing comic books on a particular Saturday in comic shops nationwide. No one seems to be certain whether or not this has actually been effective: Usually there’s anecdotal evidence of new faces, particularly children’s, in the shops on FCBD, but as far as I know there’s little proof that this has created repeat business aside from the general rise in direct-market comics sales over the past few years, which could be attributable to any number of things.
Personally, I think Quesada is right to want to hold out until a comic-book movie can do most of the event’s publicity for it. Actually, I’m not sure he was even wrong about this year’s FCBD, which he wanted to be held in June to coincide with the release of The Hulk, rather than in May to go along with the release of X-Men 2. In retrospect everyone’s mocking the idea, since X2 did much better in its own terms than Hulk did, but I think it’s important to remember several things:
1) Everyone knows that the Hulk is a comic-book character. The amount of people aware of the funnybook versions of the X-Men is much smaller. In terms of comic-book awareness, the Hulk wins.
2) More kids have off school in June than in May. I know the event’s held on a Saturday, but I think that “summer fever” that kids and teens feel is more likely to get them wanting to experiment with the funnybooks than a mere weekend off might do.
2) The Hulk may have been a disappointment in the long run, but the hype for it that first weekend was completely inescapable, and people forget that the initial reviews from many big critics were laudatory. It wouldn’t have been like attaching a Free Comic Book Day to Howard the Duck by any means.
3) The same weekend Hulk came out, Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix was released. I guess there’s an argument to be made that families with kids and teens already earmarked their entertainment dollars for that big huge hardcover that weekend (indeed, some said the Harry Potter hysteria adversely affected The Hulk’s box office), but I think it’s just as persuasive to argue that the Hulk movie plus the Harry Potter book plus free comic books could have equalled a huge pop-culture bonanza. At any rate, it was Free Comic Book Day, so it’s not like people would have to blow a lot more cash at the event if they didn’t want to. Moreover, most comic shops also sold the Harry Potter book. Had they advertised that fact in addition to hyping FCBD while simultaneously riding the Hulk-hype coattails, they might have had a real blowout on their hands.
In the end, I hope FCBD3 goes well, and that publishers avoid Nick “Call to Arms” Barucci’s advice to limit their free offerings to the big-name superheroes. Even though he encourages the big companies to release three or four free books apiece, he wants them all to be the big name-brand spandex books! People, everyone on Earth knows that if they want, they can go get a Spider-Man, Batman, Hulk, or Superman comic book in a comic book store. Why not take this opportunity to show them what the hell else is available?