Jay Bardyla of Happy Harbor Comics in Edmonton, Alberta shares his experience with Free Comic Book Day 2008 (see “National Comics Holiday this Weekend”), and says it was the ‘best FCBD we could have hoped for:”

For Happy Harbor, FCBD has always been a celebration and this year was no exception.  Our reputation for the event gave us front page exposure on one of the three local, daily newspapers, allowed us to host one of the two local morning programs (Breakfast Television on CITY TV Edmonton) and had us on one of the two local rock stations, all on Friday.

Not only that but Happy Harbor had organized to provide every student at Balwin School (nearly 500 kids!) with a FCBD comic that was handed out after myself and a couple of very talented local artists (Daniel Schneider and Jeff Martin) visited them on Thursday and showed them how comics are made.

All of that (and more) gave us the best FCBD we could have hoped for.

And now the sad news.  There are still comic companies out there that produce books that don’t allow retailers to share in the credit for making the day possible.  Why Arcana and Radical didn’t leave space for a store stamp is beyond me, but it’s thoughtless and it’s the second year in a row for Arcana.  Tokyopop did leave space for a store stamp but made the cover so slick, the books couldn’t be stamped anyway.  SIGH!

We still had a ton of fun and great sales (which were a bit of a concern since we had just opened two more stores last year) and we look forward to bigger and better things in 2009!

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