Free Comic Book Day (FCBD) is an annual promotional effort by the North American comic book industry to attract new readers to independent comic book stores. It usually takes place on the first Saturday of May and has historically been cross-promoted with the release of a superhero film. Over two thousand participating stores give away millions of comic books annually. The event was proposed by Joe Field in the August 2001 issue of Comics & Games Retailer magazine and Free Comic Book Day was launched in 2002, owned and coordinated by the industry's single large distributor, Diamond Comic Distributors. FCBD has become an official Children's Book Week event and has inspired similar events for German- and Dutch-language comics industries. Following Diamond's bankruptcy and liquidation in 2025, rights to FCBD were acquired by Universal Distribution, with competitor Penguin Random House holding a parallel event called Comics Giveaway Day.

Organization

FCBD is organized and facilitated by Diamond Comics Distributors, guided by a committee representing publishers, industry journalists, retailers, and its own management. This committee selects the titles from publishers with the aim of providing a wide variety of what the industry has to offer. The committee also investigates potential dates for the event which are then decided upon by a vote among retailers. The event has usually been held on the first Saturday in May, and is often cross-promoted with the release of the first big-budget superhero film of the summer. which was postponed first to November 6, 2020, then to May 7, 2021.

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| style="text-align:center;"|Aug 14, 2021

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| style="text-align:center;"|May 7, 2022

| style="text-align:center;"|Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

According to organizers, in the 2010s each year's event brought about one million people to comic shops

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  • Miller, John Jackson (May 2, 2012). Original magazine article suggesting "Free Comic Book Day, from 2002 to today" . The Comics Chronicles.