Well, let’s get this out of the way first. Last year’s Free Comic Book Day event was far and away our most financially successful yet at my shop (that shop being, of course, Sterling Silver Comics in lovely Camarillo, CA). In fact, the numbers were so good, I didn’t really have the expectation that we’d do better this year.
And yet, we did. Now FCBD ’26 is our most financially successful event yet. Which of course is going to give me performance anxiety next year as I can’t imagine surpassing that new total.
Money isn’t the point, of course, but as a small business owner in a retail niche not necessarily known for swimming in cash, it’s nice to have it come in. But it is one measure of gauging response to the event itself, short of doing a head count tally throughout the day, and geez louise we’ve got enough to do on Free Comic Book Day.
Speaking of which, it was very busy that day. As most of you know, ever since COVID descended upon the land, I moved the giveaways to outside the front of the shop…something frankly I should have been doing from the start. Here’s a shot of a couple of the tables, with a third visible in the background (in front of another storefront that always nicely lets me set up there when I need to):
What happens every year for FCBD is that the aforementioned anxiety creeps up and has me wondering if anyone’s going to bother coming to my humble little shop, surrounded as I am by other, larger shops with flashier attractions and more presence.
But as always, I needn’t have worried. While last year the line-up prior to the beginning of the event didn’t start happening ’til about ten minutes before, folks started showing up much earlier than that this time around, And it certainly looked like a lot more people waiting than last time. Alas, I didn’t take a pic of the line prior to the shop’s opening, but my dad did take this shortly after everything started:
“Mike, is that Doctor Strange there monitoring the line and also posing for the camera?” Yes it is, more on him momentarily.
I did take this shot right after opening, from behind the register to which I was affixed for several hours that day:
And because it will be asked…yes, we had plenty of kids coming to FCBD. Lots of them. There were kids in the store when I took that picture, but I tried to time it right so I didn’t catch any in the image. Rest assured, however, there were plenty of ’em. Part of it was that the music school/entertainment venue located in the same strip of shops as me was presented a well-attended play put on by children, nearly all of whom beelined to the comic shop as soon as the show finished. There was one little girl from said show still sporting her mustache. Sadly, a better mustache than my own.
One big reason we had such a good crowd was, of course, the return of comics writer Amy Chase to the FCBD folk at the shop.
She’s great with customers, especially kids, answers lots of questions (I heard her get “how do you get into the business?” more than once), and is just generally a magnetic personality who easily attracts attention even in the midst of free comic madness. Plus she’s cool and fun to hang out with. By the way, look for her new comic Fixation, drawn by Return to Sleepy Hollow‘s Savanna Mayer, coming this fall as part of IDW’s new crime imprint:
So, everything went smoothly, with, as may be inferred from all my money talk up front, the in-store sales more than covering the cost of the books being given away. As I’ve said before, even from back in the days when I was doing this at Ralph’s Comic Corner, from the very inception of FCBD we never lost money on the deal. It always shocked me way back when to hear of some stores who didn’t bother with participating, thinking it was a net loss for them, when it would take only the slightest effort to make it profitable. I think now the naysayers have mostly dropped away, as most shops have figured out how to make it work.
And I’ll just drop this in here, as I always like to emphasize that, as always, I had no limits on how many different FCBD offerings one could take. And, as always, it caused no problems. Some people took one of each, some people only took a couple, it all worked out.
By the end of the day, I’d given away about 90-95% of what I ordered, which is just about as close to ideal as I want on my FCBD orders. The relatively small number of leftovers I had went into the freebie box that I keep at the store year-round, which is good because I had people come by on Sunday who couldn’t make it Saturday, and I moved a good chunk of my remainders. I also had at least one teacher pick up a bunch for her classes, which I’m always happy to provide.
Given I was mostly behind the register for the day, I didn’t get much chance to peek outside and see how things were going, but it was reported to me that the comics most in demand were the Sonic the Hedgehog giveaways, both for his own title and the DC Comics crossover issue.
And judging by what was left over, the only real clunker was the Archie Comics offering, which seemed like it had barely been touched. Frankly, that doesn’t bode well for them, especially given the number of kids that had come by. The company feels increasingly like a nostalgia line for Gen Xers instead of a current, active property attracting its assumed target audience. That’s not to say I didn’t have at least one young lady that day buy a bunch of the facsimile editions off the rack, but that’s a real exception. Which makes me a little sad, as I love Archie comics. Here’s hoping that’s just a regional thing and there are kids in other parts of the country just eating them up.
I did have some leftovers of, like, the DC Comics “Next Level” promo and Marvel’s “Spidey and His Amazing Friends” title, but not unreasonable numbers of such, and they’ll do well in my freebie box. The Spidey comic especially, as I always have parents looking for something appropriate for children, and whipping out a copy of the Spidey book almost always works.
Cleared out a lot of books with the in-store sale, with DC’s Absolute titles, Invincible, and miscellaneous manga being unsurprisingly popular. Also, my Little Golden Book rack got just wiped out. It’s going to take all the money I made just to restock everything. I did try to blow out the remainder of my Funko Pops for super cheap, since that fad feels good ‘n’ done, but alas there were few takers. Looks like I’ll have to fashion those into a giant boat so that upon my eventual death, my body can be pushed out to sea upon it.
I couldn’t do this all by myself, so as usual I wrangled my dad (whom I already mentioned), and my girlfriend Nora (resplendent in her Amazing Fantasy #15 t-shirt), who were of valuable help. And standing in for the otherwise-occupied-this-year pal Dorian (who I greatly missed having around this time) was pal Deon, a fella I’ve known since first meeting him when he’d come into the previous place of employment decades ago. He’s a Cool Guy, and offered some time ago to help out when I needed him…and I needed him for sure!
There I was, prior to opening, kneeling on the ground pulling comics out of boxes to put on the tables, when suddenly there were boots and blue pants with a flowing red cape in my line of sight. Startled, I looked up…and there was pal Deon, decked out as Doctor Strange! Not requested, not expected, initially started the hell out of me, but very welcomed, and everyone seemed to enjoy his outfit combined with his cheerful enthusiasm.
And…that was that. Gave away a lot of comics, had a full store nearly the entire day, sold a lot of stuff, and your pal Mike is still feeling the aftereffects of the proceedings as he writes this. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of fun, and it’s always rewarding. Big thanks to everyone who helped out, and to everyone who came to the shop…and it was nice to have folks thanking me for doing this. And so long as Free Comic Book Day exists, and my poor beat-up body can handle it, I’ll keep doing it. Beyond all my finance talk and “what sold” and “what did or did not go over” talk, the important part is that it made everyone happy. It’s worth doing just for that.
