The Four Color Media Monitor

The SFSU's Golden Gate Xpress interviewed Joe Field, a comics industry specialist who'd worked at one point for Marvel, and has also been active in Free Comic Book Day, which he talks about in the latter part:

Matthew Ali 16:51

So, after you know, the first free comic… Actually tell me about the first Free Comic Book Day. How did that go? What was that like?

Joe Field 16:59

Well, I’ll tell you, the meeting that solidified that we were going to do Free Comic Book Day happened just about three weeks after 9/11, in early October of 2001, there was a convention in Las Vegas. And that convention became the first flight out of New York for a lot of publishers and a lot of people in the business of comics, and things at that point were still on a pretty raw edge based upon the attacks that had happened on 9/11. So, there was already some talk, just in the days after 9/11 that the comic book industry would have some benefit books to help victims and to support the effort to rebuild and, and all of that. So, there there was a growing camaraderie that had not been there. Previously, most publishers wouldn’t talk to other publishers about what their plans were, wouldn’t work together, that sort of thing. But at that meeting, we had at that convention in Vegas, which was attended by the four large publishers — Marvel, DC, Image, and Dark Horse — as well as representatives from the Diamond Comic Distributors, and my publisher, and I might be forgetting one or two other people. But at that meeting, it was decided that we would do the promotion. And then the discussion became when do we do it? What’s the specific day? And my original idea was, you know, stealing from Baskin Robbins, again, was to do an evening rather than a full day, but do it sometime in April. And Jim Valentino was then the publisher of Image Comics and he said, you know, there’s this big-budget Spider-Man movie coming the first weekend in May. And there’s going to be a lot of publicity attached to that. We could probably get a lot of publicity for Free Comic Book Day if we did that same weekend. So that wasn’t sort of a magnanimous thing for a competing publisher to offer. But all the other publishers went along with it said, “Yeah, that makes sense.” So, the first Free Comic Book Day was on May 4, 2002. And that first Free Comic Book Day was, it’s kind of a blur to me now there were — we had a good crowd of people here. I think we had maybe 600 people show up for it, which was a huge crowd for us. We had a couple of artist guests do signings, we started our tradition of having a Free Comic Book Day cake. It was a it was a really happy day, and we made we made a lot of people happy by giving away free comics. And I was even happier when some of those people returned on a regular basis to buy comics from us regularly. So the first Free Comic Book Day industry-wide was met with a pretty resounding success, and it was almost immediately decided that it would happen again the following year. We’ve been on most — most years since we’ve been on the first Saturday in May. I think there are two exceptions are the COVID years and there was 2005, I think where we were in the middle of in the middle of the summer. And that didn’t work for anybody, so we went back to the first Saturday in May the following year. And that’s where that’s where we are and that’s where it’s meant to be.

Matthew Ali 20:25

Since then, how has your work with Free Comic Book Day — how has that affected the overall industry from your perspective?

Joe Field 20:33

Well, I can’t take all of the credit for that because, or even a majority of the credit because I’m more of a consultant to what happens on Free Comic Book Day now, rather than actually doing all the work. Diamond Comics still does a good chunk of the work. There are, the publishers generally put their best foot forward with the materials that they, the comics they put together for the event. There are a lot of creative personnel, writers and artists that participate every year. What my role is now is that I’m involved in the selection process for which comics get added to Free Comic Book Day and which ones don’t. And there are always a lot more applications to be a part of Free Comic Book Day than then we can reasonably allow into the event. So it’s basically my job to disappoint a lot of publishers who want to participate, but don’t get the pass in. So I’m involved with that I’m involved with, obviously putting our event together here at Flying Colors, and then doing a little consulting with other retailers around the country, actually around the world at this point, for any questions that they might have related to the event.

First, it's a noble mission to produce comics to benefit 9-11 victims (although, there were a number of Marvel/DC items at the time that were so left-wing, they wound up doing more harm than good for the subject). But that said, it's decidedly not great if Diamond oversaw FCBD over the past 2 decades, considering the damage the monopoly they had on distribution did to comicdom for many years. At the same time, it's appalling if any retailers wouldn't seek better distribution and let their profession be turned into a mockery.

And while pamphlets, again, are not a good example for the future of the industry, what if it turned out conservative-owned publishers were barred from participation in FCBD based on their politics? IMO, if any publisher could afford to produce specials for the occasion, then obviously, they should be able to join. Yet if Mr. Field's statement is any suggestion, it's possible there's right-wingers who're blacklisted. And indeed, what if that's the case? Then FCBD has a tragic dark side. Let's also ponder that Image and Dark Horse aren't exactly known to be conservative-friendly either.

And even if FCBD helped the medium in the long run, which I don't think is the case, why do current publishers keep insisting on sticking with the pamphlet format? They continue to miss a golden opportunity to shift to a more viable format in paperback/hardcover.

Labels: history, marvel comics, msm propaganda, politics, sales