Hafeez Amin of the Genesis Foundation for Literacy (which operates a store) in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad sent us this comment on the use of Free Comic Book Day to create goodwill:
We're based in Trinidad, the West Indies and although Free Comic Book Day does very little for us each year in the way of bringing new business to our store, we choose to use it to build goodwill within the community.
Instead of hosting the entire giveaway event at our organization's offices, we started from the outset to use the regional libraries as our point of focus, primarily the children's and young adult libraries. What we have discovered is many adults wish to rekindle that nostalgic thrill of yesteryear when they read comics so they attend FCBD but they are jolted into the new age by the manga-ish art, bloodthirsty characters and simplistic storylines contained in modern books. Not very much like they remember, so we can hardly count on them returning to the fold. But the youngsters love the stuff but, sadly, cannot afford too many titles because of the high cover prices on today's comics.
So, we do the next best thing -- we give the stuff away to the youth and plant the seeds so that when they get liquid enough to spend a few extra bucks they'll have grown up with the modern titles. That seems a more sensible approach for us.
This year we started FCBD3 early by distributing hundreds of comics to the children at the pediatric wards of the hospitals. I guess if they can't come to us then we'll go them. We plan to make this a regular event for them. We have also gone into the youth detention facilities for teenagers who have gone afoul of the law. Together with the local Rotary Club we've provided some appropriate titles to the inmates, together with building a small library for them of novels, encyclopedias etc.
Comics are far too expensive today to be affordable to as big a percentage of the population as in years gone by but they can still be a very powerful tool when dealing with the youth. All it takes is imagination.
