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 is often 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, 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. The twentieth edition of FCBD was held on May 7, 2022. 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. Publishers pay for production of the give-away comic books and retailers pay the cost of printing the books that they order. Titles are divided by sponsorship level, price and anticipated demand into two tiers; participating retailers are required to carry all titles from the top tier, and may carry any or none of the second-tier titles. In 2007, the costs to the retailer were 12 to 24 cents per copy for the top tier and as high as 50 cents for the second tier. The minimum buy-in is about . History Free Comic Book Day was conceived by Joe Field, a California-based comics retailer, event promoter and partner in WonderCon. In 2001, Field noted how successful feature films based on comic book franchises were providing the comic book industry with a positive cultural and financial turnaround from the speculator bust of the mid-1990s. Inspired by Free Scoop Night at the Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlor next to his store, Field proposed Free Comic Book Day in his August 2001 "Big Picture" column in Comics & Games Retailer magazine. The column received positive reaction and Image Comics co-founder Jim Valentino suggested having the first FCBD coincide with the opening weekend of the 2002 Spider-Man feature film, in order to take advantage