While many people gathered at Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, there were others who instead flocked to their local comic book stores for Free Comic Book Day.
Andrew Lupercio, owner of Brown Bag Comics in Maysville, opened his store Saturday morning to a number of comic book enthusiasts waiting eagerly to browse his collection of books to take for Free Comic Book Day.
For Lupercio, this is his first time holding this celebration personally, but he said he was pleasantly surprised at the respectable turnout.
“It’s been an excellent turnout already,” he said. “I didn’t expect to have people here as soon as we were ready to open up the door to come in here and look at some of these comic books. I was super excited to see that so many people have gotten more interested in the comic book genre.”
Free Comic Book Day is an international celebration that occurs on the first Saturday in May, and encourages people to visit independent comic book stores, where they can receive free comic books to take home. People have had an opportunity to take home free comic books from this event since 2002.
Not only does the celebration take place all over the United States, but also in parts of Canada as well.
“It’s a big thing that we’re trying to do to get kids in here, more kids reading, more kids involved in comics — the arts, so on and so forth,” Lupercio said.
For the event, stacks upon stacks of comics specifically intended for FCBD are laid out for patrons to peruse. If a book catches their eye, then they can take it home with them, for absolutely no cost.
While the main draw for many people is the free comics, customers may find something else in the store they are willing to pay for, still netting some profits for local stores.
“Our major provider is Diamond (Comic Distributors),” Lupercio said, “and we work with them to get a lot of these comics for dirt cheap, so we can come out here and hopefully give them away to everybody, get everybody wandering into the store, looking around at some of the other stuff.”
Among many of the adult customers who visited the store Saturday, there were also plenty of father and son groups who browsed the comics for ones they liked.
Joshua Rice, one of the patrons at Brown Bag Comics was browsing the collection with his son, who had his arm wrapped around his own stack of free comics. He said normally he would have to travel to Lexington or Morehead to buy comics, but is grateful to have a local store to find what he is looking for.
From his perspective, Rice believes comics are a good thing for kids to get into, as it poses a better alternative for entertainment and encourages imagination.
“I think comics are important because you get to be in new worlds,” he said” you get to do something different. In the new generation, all (kids are) about is video games. With this here, (comics) can take them to where they need to go, what they want to be. They can actually enjoy and have an imagination with everything.”
In seeing events like FCBD, one can see where generations of comic book lovers are bridged together, and parents can share some of their interests in such a longstanding medium as comic books are with their children.
“Some of these kids, the parents that are bringing these kids in to kind of pass it on from one generation to the next, I think is a great thing to watch and see,” Lupercio said.
To Lupercio, comic books serve as both a form of entertainment for all generations, as well as a great learning tool for younger audiences.
“Comic books affect so many things with kids in general,” he said. “It teaches kids their reading skills better, they can use it for inspiration for artwork all the way up to cosplaying and other things. It inspires children to do things and to be more creative.”