Free Comic Book Day

Yesterday was my first experience of Free Comic Book Day. While it's a national holiday to some, others might ask what a comic book even is. I had never been to our local comic shop, Vintage Phoenix, but I figured this was as good a day as any to start. Mainly, I had my eye on a Star Wars comic and a short Indiana Jones comic that was part of a sampler collection. The experience was everything I hoped for and more. I got my four free comics, which I promptly read and which were really not all that good, but that's not really the purpose of Free Comic Book Day. The purpose is to get people interested in comics. I saw heart-warming scenes of fathers introducing their young sons to the world of comic books and grandfathers looking for that new issue of the Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man. I think I particularly associate grandfathers with Spider-Man because that's what my grandpa had in the bathroom magazine rack.

Most importantly, however, I witnessed nerd-dom at its finest. I couldn't help but overhear various conversations, and one 0f my favorite lines was "Did you know that people didn't know that Tony Stark is Iron Man?" Another conversation, the same people I believe, dealt with the greater intricacies of why GI Joes and Transformers are so often combined. The best part about these conversations was that they had nothing to do with the real world. For a short while on a Saturday morning, people could go to their local comic book shop, enter a new world, and forget for a little while about the chores they had to do later that day. You just can't replicate that.

Unfortunately, I can't speak for these people's conversations outside of the comic book shop. That's an entirely different topic.