Over the past 20 years, Free Comic Book Day has become a holiday of sorts for comic fans across America. Although the pandemic caused it to be canceled in 2020 and delayed in 2021, this year it’s returning to its traditional date of the first Saturday in May — and John McComas, manager of the Comic Swap in State College, couldn’t be happier.
“It’s like Christmas and Halloween rolled into one for this industry. I’m thrilled. We’re all thrilled,” he said. “We spend literally months in advance planning at some stage or other for making this a successful event. Even though it’s a blood, sweat and tears kind of thing, we all look forward to it so tremendously much.”
The Comic Swap, 110 S. Fraser St., plans to host the event from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday. As the name indicates, special editions of many comic books, commissioned especially for this day, will be available for free. There will be comics available for all age groups, and the event will also include things like door prizes and a donation table for Centre County PAWS.
McComas said that in the past, the store would attract up to 500 people on Free Comic Book Day, but with COVID-19 still playing a role, he is not sure what to expect this year. The store will be encouraging social distancing, and to keep things a bit less crowded, he said they will likely be foregoing some of the usual “extras,” such as having artists and cosplayers on site.
The store, which is owned by John Secreto, has been around since 1976. The past two years posed a challenge, as they did for many businesses, but when the pandemic hit, the shop quickly pivoted to offering curbside and mail-order services.
McComas said the shop was able to survive the unprecedented challenges of 2020 for one reason: “Just because of how great our customer base is.”
In addition, McComas said that the bookstore industry as a whole reported big increases in book sales in 2021.
“It’s widely agreed upon that while nobody had anything else to spend entertainment money on, the book chain did rather well,” he said.
“So, we started seeing more people coming in, and the vast majority of them understood the stakes for a store like ours… We made it through to the other side.”
This story appears in the May 5-11 edition of The Centre County Gazette.
