Ethan Peacock of Elfsar Comics & Toys on FCBD in Vancouver, Canada sent in this Free Comic Book Day 2007 report:
We at Elfsar Comics & Toys are big believers in the sense of community within the comics industry and we're pleased to see that it extends across the globe. We are working everyday to spread our infectious love for comic book art form and we believe nothing seems to spread it more than Free Comic Book Day.
FCBD has become the biggest community event for us in Downtown Vancouver, Canada. Each year we try to throw a mini in-store-convention for the public. This year, we had visiting writers from different publishers, both local and visiting artists doing free sketches, cheerleaders from the city's football team, the cast of a local Firefly fan-film production, a store-wide sale, gaming tournaments, and raffles including silent auctions and a charity food drive in which part of the proceeds went towards the Vancouver Food Bank. This mixture of events along with this year's stellar amount of titles made FCBD break all previous records away for us in attendance, donations and sales! Anyone who came to visit us that day got to select from five different comics and for those who also donated to the Vancouver Food bank we allowed to select an extra 5 plus have access to our selected private back stock! Which we selected comics that we felt truly represented how good comic could be. We calculate that overall we handed out over 7,000 Free Comics between 11:00am and 7:00pm!
We also made an extra effort this year to seek out other products were not listed or available in Previews and championed new and local products including a new line of books from Brand Studio Press. We also celebrated with a storewide 'Buy 2 Get 1 Free' sale which has proven to be our most popular type of sale. The sale gives the customer the ability to design their own savings by paring up three items that they would like to purchase and they get an item for equal or lesser value free!
If you have ever questioned about participating in this brilliant event in the past, question it no more! Whether you are a creator, publisher, retailer or customer, everyone benefits and it is totally worth it. As a retailer we have already seen a tremendous amount of new returning faces and the love of comics grow as a result (which is kind of the whole point, right?). In the future, I want to see more products tie-ins jump on board FCBD. It would be nice to see more toys, novelties, games, posters, etc.
We believe that after 6 years, FCBD has established itself to be an event on its own and although movie tie-ins do not hurt they are really not necessary for FCBD to be a success. In fact, we were most disappointed after attending the premiere of Spider-Man 3 and did not see any attempt at promoting FCBD for one of our industries top publishers, even for just the day before (May 4th). Sadly it was missed opportunity for Marvel to not promote the FCBD Spider-Man Book Nation Wide during the release of Spider-Man 3. We do NOT believe it should have been the responsibility of the comic book store retailer.
Regardless, FCBD 2007 was a huge success and we look forward to FCBD 2008!
The opinions expressed in this Talk Back article are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
