Pictures from Free Comic Book Day 2013, part 1

What a day this year's Free Comic Book Day turned out to be.  I'm a pretty lucky guy overall (handsome, too), but my good fortune was really in overdrive on Saturday as I got to see the Tick story I wrote in the hands of a whole lot of people.  I spent yesterday at two New England Comics locations - Quincy and Cambridge - and I had a great time at each.  I'll surely talk more about this later, but for now I wanted to upload some pictures (with a little bit of commentary) from the day.  Take a look.

I went to the story in Quincy first.  We opened half an hour early and there was a line for as long as I was there - until 2:30.  I signed a bunch of comics and met some really nice folks.

Someone had this shirt on, and I took a picture of it to show Larry - and now the world.  The person wearing it couldn't remember where he got it.  Pretty neat.

At 2:30, I took a train to the Cambridge store at Harvard Square where I met a few superheroes.  After I got some fantastic Chinese food (really, the fried rice was quite possibly the best I've ever had), I began the second tour of duty and singed some more.

Look!  It's Green Arrow, Superman, and awkward-pose-Pirate-hat guy.

For a while, I turned invisible as I sat behind the table.  We still managed to give away all but six copies of the Tick book by the time the store closed for the night.

The Harvard store is a small one, but it's in a great location and it's got some personality.  I enjoyed it a lot.

At different points during the day, I drew some terrible (really, just horrendous) Tick sketches onto ye ol' Teddy and the Yeti sketch cards.  A few people walked out with them.  I gave one to a little kid, and he brought his sister and brother back for cards of their own, which was kind of embarrassing.  "How are you so good?", the kid asked.  I couldn't find words to answer him, and instead just died a little bit inside.

There were only a few books left at the Harvard store at the end of the day.  Grimm was, apparently, not a popular choice as there were plenty of those books that remained.  I'll bet that if the books were about Ben Grimm, they would have all been taken in the first few minutes (all over the world).

Through a series of fortunate circumstances, I walked away with a load of great stuff, including the (slightly embarrassing) Lost Girls hardcover, the fourth volume of the Hellboy library editions, fellow FUBAR creators Jennie Wood and Jeff McComsey's Flutter, an Earth X companion (for 99 cents!), a new Futurama toy...

And some cool free comics that I'm gonna read the heck out of.

Many thanks to all who came out to one of the stores, and further thanks to New England Comics for having me in town for this event.  I will be at the NEC Malden store tomorrow from noon to 2:00 pm to sign a few more comics before heading home.  I hope that others elsewhere were able to pick up the book and that there was some enjoyment to be taken from it.  If you picked up either the Tick or FUBAR (or both), I hope you'll let me know what you thought of them.

More pictures to come.