Michael Tierney of The Comic Book Store in Little Rock, Arkansas saw the recent comments on Free Comic Book Day (see 'Free Comic Book Day Sponsors Announced') and feels that there is a lot of upside to the date selection:

I've been listening to the concerns over the date for this year's Free Comic Book Day event.  As a participant, both as a retailer and as a Bronze Sponsor (Little Rocket Publications... watch for those free Wild Stars comics, and check your orders for the graphic novel), this is an important event for me.

I will agree that a Spring date would have been better... after all, why wouldn't we want to get people reading more comics during the boom months of March through August, rather than during the latter part of our peak selling season?  But, at the same time, I think the results of this year's event might surprise people.

Concerns have been expressed about customers being out of town during a holiday weekend.  The counter point could be made that a lot of NEW people might also be traveling into town at that same time... and be out looking for entertainment.  I see this every holiday: I lose sales to my regular customers, but also get a bounce from visiting out-of-towners.

So... yeah, Spring probably would have been a better date.  But I think a Fourth of July holiday weekend will work out a lot better than expected.  After all... the whole point of FCBD is lassoing new customers into the hobby of reading comic books.