Today is FREE COMIC BOOK DAY!

The First Saturday of May is Declared
FREE COMIC BOOK DAY!

• Free Comic Book Day is a single day - the first Saturday in May each year - when participating comic book shops across North America and around the world give away comic books absolutely FREE* to anyone who comes into their stores. *Check with your local comic book shop for their participation and rules.
• Need a local comic shop to visit on May 4th? Use our "shop locator":
  http://www.freecomicbookday.com/StoreLocator

• [Source: Detroit News] When the doors open today for Free Comic Book Day, an annual event that's grown in stature from a few stores to some 2,000 worldwide, publishers and purveyors of tales of heroes and villains will court new readers who, despite the ease of digital displays, are making time for and spending money on comics printed on paper.
  
  Retailers say the turnout and scope of the event, which began in 2002, is giving them and the industry a chance to tout their success by giving away 4.6 million comic books featuring everything from Superman to "The Walking Dead" to Gilbert Hernandez's "Marble Season.".
  
  According to the Free Comic Book Day's website, participating Metro Detroit retailers include comic stores in West Bloomfield, Canton, Dearborn, Farmington, Clawson, Madison Heights, Warren, Ferndale, Rochester Hills, Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, as well as Windsor. For a complete list, go to www.freecomicbookday.com.
  
  It's also a chance to extol not just comics as an art-form, but as a nexus of pop culture, too, said Joe Field, who organized the first Free Comic Book Day in 2002 and has been its chief architect and No. 1 proponent ever since.
  
  "That really is the crux of Free Comic Book Day, inviting people into these shops that are really social hubs for people who like anything that's going on in popular culture," he said this week.
  
  It's also a time for the industry to tout its growth, in print and online.
  
  Among print-based products, from magazines to books, comic book publishers big and small have been posting steady gains in sales and increases in issues.
  
  John Jackson Miller, who tracks industry sales figures and estimates through his www.comichron.com website, said that sales of single-issue comic books were up nearly $60 million to $474.6 million in 2012.
  
  That compared with $414 million in 2011 and $310.6 million in 2003.