Gail Burt of Metropolis Comics in Bellflower, California, sends in her Free Comic Book Day (see '2005 Free Comic Book Day in the Books') comments and declares it 'a great day:'

Last year's Free Comic Book Day was such a downer from years past (perhaps 100 people through our store that day), being that it was held on the 4th of July weekend, which is traditionally pretty dead for us, we didn't know what to expect this year.

Wow.  What a difference a weekend makes.

I'm so relieved that I ordered stout - see, we're on an old-town boulevard, and during the summer, one day a week, the street is closed at both ends for street faires.  We give comics away during those events, so I ordered enough to get us through the summer.

I thought.

We offered the Batman HeroClix or the FCBD minimate - choose one, plus a couple of free comics to everyone who came.  We were out of HeroClix (started with 100) by 2pm (we opened at our regular time, noon, with a line waiting), and we ran out of FCBD minimates (started with 200) by 5:30pm.  We were open until 8pm, so we figure since not all comers took either of those, we had about 350 to 400 people through the store.  About half were our regular people, so that's a lot of new folks to see!  We also had a guest artist, Paul Harmon, whose new book from Image, Mora, is very stylish and cool.  Paul was extremely generous and did wonderful sketches from about 2pm until 6pm.