In 2012, 10 years after the first Free Comic Book Day, Diamond Comic Distributors rolled out Halloween ComicFest, a similar promotion in which comic shops gave out free (to customers) books on the last Saturday in November.
While not having quite the same cache as FCBD, it capitalized on a holiday when kids and fans were going to be dressing up anyway, and presented comics as a trick-or-treat alternative to Mary Janes and loose pennies.
This year, like everything else, will be different. Diamond is still planning a Halloween ComicFest, on Oct. 31 — actual Halloween, if we’ll be able to call it that — but instead of free comics, the promotion will be used to sell Previews-exclusive collectibles, such as an Infamous Iron Man Funko POP, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer Vinimate and a glow-in-the-dark RoboCop action figure.
The move follows the cancellation of Free Comic Book Day in May and its repurposing as a summerlong series of weekly giveaways at comic shops, which, while it still helped get some die-hards hype for stuff like this fall’s X of Swords and Robert Kirkman and Chris Samnee’s Fire Power, still didn’t have the same effect as a one-day event that brings hundreds to thousands more people to shops to grab free swag and purchase additional goods.
“When retailers were told that we were still getting FCBD books, a lot of them either canceled all of their order or cut them down to only a fraction of what they first ordered,” Gregg Mester, co-owner of Level Up Entertainment in Mays Landing, New Jersey, told Xavier Files. (Level Up fell in the cut-them-down camp, FYI.) “I think Diamond and the publishers saw how the numbers laid out and saw that it just wasn’t worth printing HCF books since the pandemic wasn’t going to let retailers hold big events.”
So in a sense, the pivot to collectibles was a bit of retailer wish fulfillment, especially if many retailers already had orders in for those items prior to last week’s Diamond announcement.
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Still, one can’t help but be reminded of Diamond owner Steve Geppi’s stated desire to produce “pandemic era collectibles,” which, if you can find a more late-stage capitalism phrase, by God, keep it to yourself. It’s also another reminder that the industry, its corporate stakeholders and, hell, even the fans don’t value comics as much as they do the things their IP spawns.
All that said, it feels weird to get on a soapbox and decry the defiling of the great and proud tradition of Halloween ComicFest. Even as comic-giveaway promotions go, it was No. 2. To do anything other than shrug and say, “Yeah, that’s fine. Things are tough all over, and we all gotta do what we gotta do” is akin to being that person who still complains about how MTV doesn’t show music videos anymore in 2020.
And considering I can find nary a public stink in the wild from more vocal, nationally known retailers like Brian Hibbs and Joe Field (the man who invented Free Comic Book Day), the more I tell myself, “Yeah, you should probably let this one go. Watch some DC FanDome trailers or something.”
Dan Grote is the editor-in-chief of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Winston Wisdom.
