Hey Kids! Free Comics!

On Friday, May 3, the amazing Spider-Man will swing onto the silver screen to save Mary Jane Watson from the menace of the Green Goblin. The next day, he'll try to rescue the comic book industry from the threat of the Incredible Shrinking Audience.

The wall-crawler is the key to the most ambitious promotion ever attempted by the folks who make and sell what used to be called funny books. It's "Free Comic Book Day," and it involves more than 30 comic book publishers and over 2,000 retailers across the country and in 28 other nations, teaming up to make available to the public on Saturday, May 4, more than 2 million comics at no charge. Four of the industry's leading publishers have even printed special editions of select titles expressly for the event.

If this sounds suspiciously like one of those plots for global conquest that Spidey and his spandex-clad brethren are always trying to foil, that's not far off. The people inside the comics industry are hoping against hope that this gargantuan giveaway will transform thousands of mild-mannered citizens into a new legion of super-readers hungry for their product.

If you're wondering why the comics industry is all hot to give away a couple million books, the answer's all in the numbers. In 1939, a year after his debut in Action Comics, Superman sold 500,000 copies of that book in a month. Today, the Man of Tomorrow moves only 38,000 copies of Action each month. In the Sixties, Spidey routinely sold 350,000-400,000 copies per issue. Now, he's lucky to score 90,000. Even the most popular books today -- invariably, those featuring Marvel's X-Men characters -- barely sell 100,000 copies -- what a second-string title like Aquaman sold 35 years ago. The vast majority sell much less.

And this comes just a decade after comics saw several landmark issues sell in the millions. But then, that was the era of industry events like the "Death of Superman," which sparked extraordinary interest from both fans and folks who hadn't cracked a comic in years, and the days of the speculator boom, when huge numbers of books were snapped up as investments -- investments that ultimately proved about as profitable as Enron stock. Ever since the speculator bubble popped, comics' audience base has been eroding dramatically. The heavyweight sellers across the industry, even those at leaders DC and Marvel, have commonly lost 70-80% of their readership they had 10 years ago.

Now along comes a spider, man, that will catch millions of moviegoers in his web. Estimates for the film's take on opening weekend have been as high as $70 million. Even if it does only half of that (which would be about what another comics-inspired movie, Blade II, did in March with a much less familiar character), Sam Raimi's film adaptation will still draw four million people to see a movie about a character from a comic book. To comic shop owners, that's a potential audience for the wares they sell. So by holding Free Comic Book Day the day after Spider-Man's release, they hope to piggyback on the attention generated by the film and attract those early spider-fans into their friendly neighborhood comic specialty outlet.

The concept of using free comics as a lure for new readers has been credited to Joe Field, a California retailer who saw an ice cream store near his shop in Concord giving away samples and figured it could work for his business, too. In a column he writes for the trade publication Comic and Game Retailer, Field pitched the idea as an industry-wide event, and it garnered a surprising amount of support. In fact, it may be a sign of just how hard times are for the industry that virtually everyone, from the big corporate publishing houses to the little independents to the distributor to retailers of all sizes, lined up behind the idea without much fuss.

And they are all lined up: DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, Image, Archie, Oni, Fantagraphics, Keenspot, Tokyopop, Antarctic, Top Shelf, Chaos!, El Capitán, Sirius, Humanoids Publishing, and 20 other publishers, Diamond Comic Distributors, at least two-thirds of all the comic shops in North America, and even Get Caught Reading, the nationwide literacy campaign supported by the Association of American Publishers and the Magazine Publishers of America. "Comic books are as intelligent, compelling, and demanding as any other form of storytelling," says AAP President & CEO Pat Schroeder, "and they are a worthy addition to any parent, teacher, or other adult's arsenal of reading tools."

In a sense, Free Comic Book Day couldn't be coming at a better time. The industry is more diverse than ever, with more intelligent, compelling, and demanding material being produced -- in a dizzying range of genres than ever before. You can find great reads for every taste and every age. The irony is that so many worthy comics are being produced and so few of them are being read by people who would enjoy them. If Free Comic Book Day can amend that, it will be as much a victory for the artists and the culture as for the publishers and retailers.

Alas, the odds are against them. Unlike the heyday of comics, you can't find books lining spinner racks in every mom 'n' pop icehouse and grocery store in the land, and any you do find are far from the bargain they were in those days, when they could compete with candy bars and sodas for a youngster's dollar. Now, a comic is three to five times what you'd pay for a Coke or a Snickers, and the only places you can be sure to find them are shops that specialize in comics, places with a not wholly undeserved reputation for catering to social misfits and being less than receptive to the general customer.

But bad odds never kept a comic book hero from a fight. So the folks in the business of comics are going to see if they can't prove to you that their books are worth your time and money and you can find them in shops that are clean and friendly and fun to visit. They want to see comics survive and thrive and be celebrated as the indigenous art form they deserve to be. They're taking a risk for a good cause. Just like Spidey would.