Saturday isn’t just going to be Free Comic Book Day this year. When Diamond screwed up and killed itself, Universal Distribution Network took over the event. However, the same exclusivity that gave Diamond near-absolute power in comic distribution is also what killed it when they ticked everybody off too many times, including the publishers after artificially extending the 2020 Plague rules so nobody could distribute comics even when stores could open up. At a time when comic stores were already getting hit that was very bad timing on their part. No exclusive contracts were renewed and many publishers took their business elsewhere entirely.
One of the places they went was Penguin Random House, usually known for publishing novels more than comics. Still, they have a comics division and this year they decided that, rather than work with Universal to push the Free Comic Book Day brand, to go their own way. Time will tell if that was a good idea or not. They’ve posted a list of what comics are being offered for their “Comic Giveaway Day”, happening the same day as Free Comic Book Day to the convenience of customers, but it’s not a very good listing. Unlike Free Comic Book Day, which sadly gave up the PDF samplers, the Comics Giveaway Day site is just a list of comics and covers for what they’re offering. No summary, no credits, just a list in an article. That’s kind of weak, really.
What’s worse is I don’t even know if I’m going to be able to get anything. According to their store map neither of the comic stores I can properly get to for my free comics is taking part. Their websites and Facebook pages just list Free Comic Book Day, so I may not be able to get any of these. That’s not a good start, and I know they get their comics from Penguin that aren’t available elsewhere. I’ll be asking both owners about that and I’ll let you know what they say. (I’m friends with both of them because they’re awesome. One’s a former DC editor and the other I’ve gone to for decades until I lost my income. The former editor used to work there before going to DC, getting tired of their nonsense, and coming back to open his own comic store.)
So this article is going to be a bit different. SInce there’s more guesswork involved as to what, if anything, I can get or will even want, we’ll just go over what I’d like to get, though I might have to explore digital options.
So what is going into my decisions. Boom’s Jem & The Holograms cover has an artstyle I don’t care for, and I haven’t been interested in what I’ve seen of their alternate Power Rangers universe. Garfield looks good because it’s Garfield and I don’t know how they’d screw that up. Something Is Killing The Children isn’t in my genre. So only one offering is coming from them.
Dark Horse has two offerings, and what I’ve seen of their comic continuation of Avatar: The Last Airbender has been about as interesting as the various live-action demakes. There are directions the characters have taken, like Mai dumping Zuko for some other guy, that have been odd choices to me, while The Legend Of Korra did good and bad things to the franchise. Frankly, I need to finish the final season of Aang’s journey and call it good.
On the other hand, there’s a Masters Of The Universe comic and I don’t know how Dark Horse has faired with that. The cover doesn’t look like the same continuity as that terrible Netflix offering or the upcoming live-action movie. The problem is that with no sample pages and not even a summary I don’t know what I’m in for, so I’m doing a lot of guessing just putting them on the pull list.
IDW has two offerings as well. Locke & Key is a horror comic, so that’s out. Meanwhile Sonic is the only comic I still hear good things about from IDW, who squandered their Hasbro licence under bad ideas, and their Ninja Turtle stuff I never hear about since they decided to make their own girl turtle. (Hopefully she’s better written than Venus from The Next Mutation, but Nickelodeon has been making some weird decisions with the franchise. For another time?) I’m willing to give that one more of a shot.
Marvel is breaking the pattern with four comics. One features the stuff they got from the former 20th Century Fox: Planet Of The Apes, Predator, and Alien. This puts the apes in one of the bigger publishers for the first time, but Dark Horse was already doing a great job with Predator and Alien, even doing the better crossovers between the two while the movies have failed to capitalize on their success. I hear there’s also an Apes/Predator crossover coming. Still, since I know nothing about it and I never really followed either franchise that seriously, it’s not like I care.
On regular Marvel’s side we have a Spider-Man story with a “queen in black” that from the cover just looks like the symbiotes and if I wasn’t already down on modern Spider-Man for the Spider-Marriage’s treatment I don’t care about the expanded symbiote lore with their “gods” and king and queens and whatnot. Sometimes it’s like they’re trying to hard because everyone wants their mark on the history but nobody wants to do anything with the characters themselves. I love to worldbuild myself but it’s what you do with it that counts.
The preschool offering has Jeff The Land Shark versus Disney Junior Venom. Yeah, I don’t care. Sense a theme yet? Continue it to the X-Men Armageddon thing. I was never a huge X-Fan and everybody’s a plant clone or something these days. I’m trying to reduce my clutter, not add more crap to my comic collection.
There’s manga coming, too. Kodansha has a sampler but Blue Lock and Dragon Circus are two properties I never heard of. There’s a manga version of Stitch where he ditched Lilo (poor girl is not getting a break in the 2020s) in favor of some little girl. Might check it out, might not necessarily get it if it’s even an option. There’s also a Webtoon sampler, which is manga-ish but I know even less about what they’re doing and this is supposed to be about physical comics, not web comics. I can get that from FCBD tie-in digital comics at Drive Thru Comics.
Speaking of which, indie titles have more of a spot here than in Free Comic Book Day. Ignition Press has something called Minotaur but you literally can’t judge that book by it’s cover. It’s not even a good poster or attention getter. Ten Speed Graphic has samplers for two upcoming graphic novels, something called Mister Magic and a preview of what I have to assume is a story set during the American Revolution because it’s called The British Are Coming and the cover is set during a conflict between colonists and redcoats. RH Children’s Books have two offerings as well. One is set for their all-ages listings (they have three age groups but you have to know which text color matches which age group) about a sentient pizza and his taco friend just called Pizza And Taco. The other is in the teen bracket, but I couldn’t tell you what School Bus Graveyard is about if I hadn’t seen motion comic samples in ads on YouTube for a month some months ago. Even then I’m not sure what’s going on. Something about visiting a haunted house and running for the bus every night to avoid being killed by the monsters or…something.
Penguin is even getting their own stuff in. We have The Last Kids On Earth And The Zombie Parade, a zombie book for kids. Then there’s The Whole Wide World Of Mabel Mulligan, which has a girl in a tree writing something in a notebook while talking to an animal in a hoodie. I couldn’t tell you what it is, but I’m no zoologist.
As to what I’d like to get, the covers are all over this article, and you know as much about them as I do. Some of you might even know more. There’s no dedicated page for this information and the article they do have tells you “these exist and here’s what age groups they’re recommended for”, and that’s it. I miss the page samples from Free Comic Book Day but they still put more effort by giving each comic a dedicated page and description. I couldn’t find anything like that on Comic Giveaway Day’s site. Personally I think they should have waited for autumn, maybe take over Halloween Comic Fest. Maybe more stores would be taking part. Or maybe their locator map is out of date and the comic stores near me WILL take part.
If they do I’ll review them on X-Twitter as well, but I don’t know how long all of that will take. I might explore digital options. I don’t know. I’m just not sure this was thought out very well. Every publisher and distributor who can afford to should join in on one event, make them as free for the stores as they are the customers because they need to do something to stop the stores from closing, thus having less options to sell their comics, and properly promote the event with ads and reaching out to comic reviewers with early samplers for spoiler free reviews to help hype the event. (The last one is a stretch but they should totally do the other stuff.) We’ll find out on Saturday when or if I can do anything with these comics, but let me know if you find them. I’ll be curious where they ended up.
BW Media Spotlight 