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what I saw happening in comics. As the months went by, though, I found that I could change what I didn’t like in comics with my own company, and so I really wasn’t that pissed off, anymore. Sure, I’d get bent at some avoidable idiocy, and I’d let fly a few choice epithets, haphazardly direct ed at the offenders, but nothing really has been giving me that lurching feeling of a loose cannon rolling about the deck of a flailing ship quite like the missed opportunities I’ve been seeing lately. In fact, I’m getting a little steamed because I’m at the point now where I can see the opportunities coming, and I can see how they’re going to be missed, and boy does that put a bunch in my shorts. Makes me feel like Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. unheeded warnings, ineffectually screamed into the night, heard, if at all, by soulless pod people. Super comics retailer Joe Field, of the excellent shop Flying Colors, first suggested a "Free Comics Day" as a way to do some customer outreach. Savvy marketer that Joe is, he took a look at the pop culture landscape and figured that with the Spider-man movie approaching, and a comics-themed novel having won a Pulitzer, why not make a concerted, industry-wide effort to parlay some of the upcoming mainstream-media attention into a quick run into the spotlight for the comic book industry? Joe’s idea was simple: free comics, donated by publishers, all given out, nationwide, on the same day. What could be simpler? This Free Comics Day thing, for example.

Well, here’s where we get to that "missed opportunities" thing I was talking about.

By the time Joe’s simple idea got filtered through the morass of multi-com pany bureaucracy, the logistics involved and the usual suspects putting in their two cents, the whole thing got turned into a cock-up of Godzilla-esque proportions.

For example.

Long-time readers of this column will recall that I have my own publishing house, AiT/Planet Lar. In my capacity as publisher, I got the Diamond com munique about the Free Comics Day plans. To tell you the truth, I was pret ty excited about it, because as Joe had outlined his idea, I thought it was just going to go over like gangbusters. AiT/Planet Lar had just shipped twenty-six thousand dollars worth of trade paperbacks to retailers, right before Christmas, absolutely free, and that had been extremely well received. How much better a day of Free Comics, supported by all publish ers, would work!

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