Free Comic Book Day is Essential.
A low price ticket to the Dream Factory
Free Comic Book Day is important.
It's one day a year that really invites new readers into comics—kids discovering something new, or adults returning to something they thought they’d left behind. That kind of rediscovery is powerful.
Caption: New readers and lifelong fans coming together on one of comics’ most accessible days.
I’ve been deep into comics for so long now, but I do remember the moment I got pulled back in.
Early 2000s. I stumbled onto Ultimate Spider-Man on Marvel.com. They had free issues up—you could just read them. At that point, I hadn’t picked up a comic in four or five years. Maybe I read a couple at the library, or flipped through a few at a friend’s place, but I hadn’t really come back.
Then I got the itch.
The first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movie was about to drop. I wanted to reconnect—to remember what it felt like to get lost in a Spider-Man story. And here was this new take on a character I loved. Bendis and Bagley had distilled 40 years of lore into something fresh. That comic didn’t just entertain—it reawakened something.
Caption: Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley’s Ultimate Spider-Man—a modern gateway for returning fans.
I’d spent the last several years reading plays, writing theater, trying to become the next Mamet or Albee. But that moment brought me back to who I was at seven years old: someone who wanted to make comics. Not just read them—create them. Back then, I wanted to be an artist. I was already inventing characters, spinning my own stories in the playground with my friend John Fuller. We were riffing on Kirby-style epics before we even knew what that meant.
That reconnection led me down the rabbit hole again. The Walking Dead had just launched. Invincible wasn’t far behind. Hellboy, the X-Men, indie Image titles—I was broke, still in my twenties, but I’d find a way to dip back in when I could.
And that’s the thing. Comics were always meant to be cheap. Disposable. That’s what made them magic.
Free Comic Book Day remembers that.
Caption: Comics were meant to be handled, traded, and read to pieces.
Yes, today’s comics are expensive. Tariffs, paper costs, the shrinking market—it all adds up. But Free Comic Book Day cuts through that. It’s a moment when the industry pauses and thinks about the reader. The dreamer. The person who might not be able to afford a stack of floppies every week but still wants to be part of this art form.
It’s not just nostalgia. It’s cultural memory. It’s community. It’s saying: Here. This belongs to you, too.
We don’t always know why we love comics so deeply. Why this mix of words and pictures can mean more to us than a song or a movie or even a novel. But it does. Comics are a limitless dream engine, and they belong in people’s hands.
So maybe the readership isn’t what it used to be. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe once a year, we just give it away for free, and trust that the spark will catch in someone new.
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Come say hi this Free Comic Book Day
I’ll be at Coliseum of Comics (East Colonial, Orlando) this Saturday, May 3rd, 11am–3pm.
I’ll be doing free sketches, selling my new comic Upheaval, some older books, and original art.
Caption: I’ll be sketching, signing, and slinging comics—come through!