I have been a Caribbean-based retailer with Diamond for more than a decade.  During that time we have constantly kept trying to get comics accepted as a legitimate form of reading and not as 'sub-literature' as so many people have deemed it.

For us, we twinned last year's Free Comic Book Day with National Library Day, which was May 15th.  We got thousands of persons to come out, many of whom had never even been to a library in years.  They averaged more traffic in two hours because of FCBD than they usually got for all six opening days of the week!  This year we plan to do it on May 3rd, once again at three branch libraries.  We hope to encourage as many people into reading, not necessarily just comics, but use Free Comic Book Day to make people aware of books in general.

I think that this push for literacy is bigger than just getting people into a comic-book store.  That's important, I agree, but ultimately we do want to get people back into reading. And what better stuff than comics... and where better than at the library?

Note--we contacted Hafeez to get more information about his operation, and he amended his comment with the following:

We operate under the Genesis Foundation for Literacy and are based in Port-of-Spain, the capital city of Trinidad in the Caribbean.  Ours is a non-profit organisation and we operate the comic book store to help fund the Foundation's work with youth literacy.

Over the past 17 years we have donated freely thousands of comics and graphic novels to schools, remedial reading projects for slow learners, orphanages, private institutions, the public, comic-based movie premieres etc.  Finally it seems to be paying dividends.  God willing, in March Trinidad is due to open a new USD$100 million-plus National Library Complex and we have been granted a special section for comics and graphic novels.  Our aim is to donate more than USD$50K worth of graphic novels by year's end.  The library administration has also mandated that we maintain and continually restock the shelves of this important project.

Like I said before, I know that getting people (especially youngsters) back into the stores is important, but ultimately we want to get them reading again too.  Comics provide a perfect starting point for them but with the prices of the modern comics being so expensive a child can hardly afford to keep up.  We are trying to bridge that gap by offering them comics at the library in the hope that they will take a love of four-colour fantasy into their teen years and beyond.