John Weddleton of Bosco's in Anchorage, Alaska shares his Free Comic Book Day experience:

The first Saturday of May is not a good day to have this event in Alaska.  It is the University's graduation day, the huge "Walk for Hope" day, kick-off for City Wide Clean-up, motorcycle blessing day and many other events.  The list of competing events is long.  It is also often the first day of real warm weather.  This year it was over 70 degrees and sunny, sunny, sunny (note all of the sunglasses!).  

BOSCO'S has learned to live with that and FCBD is getting better all the time.  This year we were more aggressive about handing out flyers at "Kid's Day" two weeks ago.  We handed out 4,000 flyers.  We emailed, MySpaced, Twittered and websited.  We had coupons in comics we gave away at the midnight opening of Wolverine at two theatres.  We sent out the nice postcards we got through Diamond.  No television or paid print ads this year but we got a mention with a picture in the Anchorage Daily News' "Hot Picks" section.  We sponsored "Fanboys" at our neighbor the Bear Tooth theatre pub and gave away Star Wars comics with FCBD flyers attached.  And of course, signs in the stores and on the sign board outside.

BOSCO'S continues to give over 1,000 comics to the local libraries for them to give away.  We gave away thousands at our stores with a limit of three per customer.  The next day, we gave a comic to each of the 500 participants at Sunday's Bike For Women.

Sales were slightly above average at our mall store and it was a very big day at BOSCO'S main store on Spenard Road.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.